Some people are amazed when I tell them what I do for a day job – but it’s so different! Is it? That well-worn lane is where it is because over time, people have found that this is the easiest/best way to get from a to b. Yes, there’s that other way, but it’s boggy in Winter, but this path is always passable, and therefore gets used more. People see the path and use it because it *is* a path, and there it still is today.

It’s the same with business processes. They are a way of getting from a to b, and over the years people have worked out what the best way of achieving that is. On first inspection, you might well ask why they don’t take that other route, as you can’t see any good reason not to. But people that have been there a while know the pitfalls and may even have been that route themselves.

Just as you might put up a sign in the landscape to warn of possible dangers, it’s important to note the other routes that were considered, and why they are not suitable. You stop the potential for endless circular discussion by documenting the warnings, but more importantly, you also allow for the re-evaluation in future, if the pitfalls are made safe. Knowledge is powerful stuff.

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Part of my analysis process is to test out the TRUTHs, POLICYs, LAWs and WISHes that I discover, by running them past as many interested parties as possible. Of course, not everyone gets to make decisions, but input is important. You will discover all sorts of things that maybe no-one had thought to mention and you may be told lots of things that will not longer be a TRUTH in the new system, or POLICYs that will no longer apply. Do not dismiss these. Your users will have been doing this job for a long time and have a great deal of experience that you do not. I add a caveat here – always always always ask the reason for the answers you receive. You cannot expect to be able to evaluate the input if you cannot see why you have been told something. After all, people often believe things that are not true.

Part of the importance of working with end users on this process is to discover what they hold dear and how you can map that onto the new world with minimum discomfort. Humans are wired to hold onto things they already have or know. This is a survival instinct. The fear of loss is greater than the expectation of gain, and the longer the thing has been owned, the harder it is to conceive of letting go. Once you know this, you can start to work around it.

The fact is, businesses need to change to remain viable. But what you have to do is be subtle about it. Investing the time to involve the end users softens the blow of the loss of the old way, by allowing them to feel ownership of the new way. If you can get them excited about all the shiny new stuff that will be available, and how much better things will be, and importantly – how you are taking their ideas on board and letting them shape things that will affect them – the easier the separation from the old system will be.

This has the added benefit that you will have a cohort of evangelists ready to spread the word about the great things that are coming, and to help their team members adjust. Training will also be easier, as your evangelists know the new way almost as well as you do.

Go on, talk to your users, what have you got to lose?

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Much as I generally dislike Jack Straw, my opinion of him improved somewhat as a result of his ability to change his mind. As far as I understand the 30-second news story, he did the right thing. He had an idea, it looked to him like a good idea, he asked a few people what they thought, they didn’t like it and said it was a bad idea, he wasn’t sure, so he decided not to go ahead with what he now wasn’t sure was a good idea. If only more people felt able to do that.

From my perspective, he got two things right: he canvassed opinion, and he then used that to revise his decision. It is not a sign of weakness to ask other people to think about your problem with you. It is not a sign of weakness to then use their advice. It is not a sign of weakness to change your mind. It is a sign of weakness to blindly go ahead with what you now see is a bad idea just because you are not brave enough to hold up your hand and say you’ve made a mistake.

The same applies to development projects: if you see you’ve made a design mistake, you can always paper over it and leave it as a hidden treasure for the maintenance programmer who inherits the system. Or, you can bite the bullet, admit you’ve got it wrong, and then re-do the work until it is right. Unfortunately, it is hard to communicate to non-techs exactly why you need to re-do the work and why you are adding extra time to the project. It’s easier to pretend you haven’t noticed the problem and just steam ahead and meet deadlines.

The trouble is, when you get it wrong, users suffer. Good software is invisible to the user – they stop noticing what they are using to do their job, and just do their job. Bad software makes every task seem difficult and awkward. So I would argue (and have done) that it is better to nip the problems in the bud in the development stage, rather than leave it for someone to apply sticking plasters later on.

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Most companies have some form of IT infrastructure: you almost have to. Most of the companies that have this IT infrastructure, do not appreciate what it can, and does, enable them to do. Which is excellent, because good IT should be unobtrusive; it should be a natural part of your everyday life and enable you to do your job more effectively.

Time progresses and technologies improve, but has your business reevaluated its IT strategy lately? What is there available now that could help you survive this downturn? Is there any way you could invest some money now and enable your operation to become leaner, smarter, faster. Evolution doesn’t just apply to nature, you know.

Almost every day, I come across an instance of a user-grown ‘system’ that has evolved to try and cope with a demand. It’s not the best solution, but it does the job. Once I’ve worked out what that job is, I can then rationalise the process and smooth off those rough corners that have been a niggle for the users. I am always amazed with the ingenuity of people when faced with a problem. Sometimes the solutions they come up with just need a little automation to make them more efficient.

The other day, I met with a group of users who have a particularly cumbersome application designed for them. The original user of the system signed off the development work solely on the basis that it was ‘better than what we had before’. So, over the years, as needs have changed, it has become harder and harder to use this application, as it didn’t really do what was required in the first place.

Before the meeting, I sat and thought about the process that the application is designed to assist with. I put myself into the position of a user of the system, and all the things I would want and need to be able to do. The users did the same and came to me with a mind-map of their process and a wishlist of features. I talked them through my ideas and then asked them what they thought. I had covered most of their wish list, and more. So development work will start on that, and together we will turn a department struggling to cope, into an efficient, stress-free team, who can spend more time on customer service, and less time wondering which button to press.

These are exciting times indeed.

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I have more RSS feeds in my feedreader than I have time to read, and I come across more every day that interest me. The Internet is absolutely fatal to anyone with wide-ranging interests: it’s so easy to overdo the information influx and become dazed and bewildered by it all. The thoughts of a billion brains is not meant to fit into one head, after all.

The trouble is, the Internet has become like a giant distributed brain with all its thoughts available to read whenever you choose. If you are interested in almost everything, then there’s so much to read, so much to think about, and it becomes really difficult to have any thought processes left to deal with everyday life.

We are so tremendously lucky to live in an age where we are getting closer and closer to having the sum of human knowledge a mouse-click away. No matter what the subject, you can find information about it. It becomes really easy to become a relentless consumer of information, retrieving snippets from all over the globe without moving from your chair. But I’m not sure that’s a healthy habit to get into. It’s very easy to become mentally exhausted just trying to absorb and process it all.

The sheer volume of information, thoughts, opinions, essays, comments etc that is out there is terrifying. I have many feeds in my RSS reader that I think I should read, either because they will help me become a better person, or will keep me up to date with technology, or just keep me posted about what’s happening in web development. I’ll confess right now – I hardly touch those feeds. I just can’t take it all in. 

 I don’t really know what the answer is – as a nerd I do have a need to attempt to keep up with what all the other nerds are up to, but at the same time, there are just too many of them, and they are all talking at once.. 

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I will use what version and what browser I choose, to consume your content. If I choose to have the text chiselled out onto the back of a passing badger, that is *my* choice.

At the moment I’m suffering my way through an enormous web application, targetted at IE7 only (as it’s an intranet application and we are currently using IE7), but I would not dream of testing only in IE7, as I realise that time progresses (shocking, I know), and as IE crawls more and more towards standards compliance, I’m hoping that one day the playing field will be level enough for me not to have to test in n+1 browsers. Things looked fine in IE7 that looked skewiff in Safari3, which told me I’d got something wrong. I don’t want to be lied to by a browser, so being tied to IE7 forever sounds like my idea of hell.

It wouldn’t be quite so bad if IE8 went for ‘latest-version’ by default. That way, things can progress naturally. I *can* see the appeal of being able to specify IE7 mode if you have to (if you’ve hacked together something terrible in a hurry and can’t fix it before they rush out IE8 asap) to buy you a little more breathing time if it looks like trolls toenails in IE8. But we don’t want to get stuck in 2006, do we?

What saddens me most is the fact that it seems to be tearing the webdev community apart. There are some quite personal attacks going on and it’s sad to see WaSP eating itself. I’m sure it will sort itself out, we’re all adults.

I think the real problem is not necessarily the browser developers, it’s the web developers themselves. WaSP and co. are more or less a tiny minority of idealists (I’m not knocking idealism, I suffer terribly myself). Most web developers are cowboys. Yes, sweeping generalisation, but if you look at the majority of sites you get a good idea of the level of standards-awareness that there is out there. And yet, that’s not necessarily the fault of the developers either. I was consulted on a web project and mentioned accessibility. I got the response of ‘but who enforces that, do we have to do it?’ from the person commissioning the site. With attitudes like that, there is no real incentive to push for standards compliance in projects. It’s always quicker to cut corners and knock something together that displays and behaves okay in IE6 and doesn’t suck too much in IE7. Gets the job done, doesn’t it?

Have depressed myself with that, I always find it delightful to discover that some people *do* actually care about doing things properly and cleanly. I evangelise about nice clean code, use of CSS, maintainability, accessibility and basic sanity, but sometimes I feel like Scary Bag-lady haranguing passers-by.

What the web standards community *really* needs to do is to reach out a bit more, beyond the elite crowd, to the bums-on-seats level of web developer. Enthuse and fire these people with your message, get corporate penetration with the benefits of standards compliance – make it a *standard* approach to web development.

Only then, can we win the browser war.

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My forebears would have swooned at the information available for the mere effort of searching. It’s not even as if you have to actually perform the search yourself- typing a few choice words in a box does not involve effort – it’s all done with computers these days you know.

I often feel, at work, that I’m mocked slightly for my keenness to get to the bottom of a problem, to find out what the cause is and squish it once and for all. I flex my google-fu at the slightest provocation in order to find out what exactly an annoying error message means; instead of telling the user to close the application and open it again.

There is just no excuse for being ignorant of things these days. Not that you have to remember everything – I outsource most of my memory to Google these days. I’m always reminded of the wonderful Feynman anecdote ‘map of the cat’ where he is incredulous that biology students bother to memorise the internal structure of a cat when it can be looked up in moments. I totally understand that sentiment, and generally feel it’s more important to get the gist of something rather than remember every little detail (unless you’re the surgeon performing an operation on my person, I suppose!). What I mean is, understanding is more important than being able to parrot back facts and figures. If you can’t tell me *why* something is true, I won’t be impressed when you say it is.

I will be forced to go find out where Edmonton is, it’s like a nagging toothache.

On a completely separate, but bitterly related, note, I give you How Email Works – a child’s view of the internets. Well, my inner child’s view, anyway.

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I look after a quirkily-written application at work, where the symbol for ‘click here to go into the details page from the summary page’ is a dustbin. Yes, a dustbin. The (clearly only *almost*) obvious symbol for deletion/discarding/removal is actually the button you need to click to go into the screen to deal with the item on the list. This actually causes me pain when I click on it, as my brain is screaming no from the symbol-recognition point of view, while also telling me that I know how the button works and it’s safe to click on it. This kind of conflict makes it very difficult for users to use the application, as the brain ‘forgets’ the real use of the button and sees only the symbol.

Choosing appropriate representations of a particular concept or action is an often-underestimated skill: it requires the empathy to put yourself in the position of your user and what they might have been exposed to and how they might classify the action they need to take. It’s all very well that we have absorbed certain standard symbols for certain concepts and actions, but what if the user has not been exposed to these symbols? I found myself trying to explain how to save a file in Word, to someone whose computer didn’t have a floppy drive. Why is the ‘save’ icon a disk? Why would she associate saving files, with a floppy disk? What’s a floppy disk? This is an example of a symbol that made sense at the time, and users have become accustomed to seeing it, so it still makes sense as it is familiar. But to a user who does not understand the symbol, it is no longer possible to grasp it even in a physical metaphor sense, as the physical method has changed. Saving files no longer ‘looks like’ floppy disks.

Like it or not, Microsoft have had a considerable influence upon the way we develop software interfaces. Through their sheer dominance, they have exposed most computer users to their way of doing things, so that any other way seems ‘wrong’ and ‘difficult’ for a user to grasp. If you want to write an interface to a word processing package, you had better make sure that it functions as the user expects it to i.e. like Word, or it will have to be *really* spectacular to compete. I wouldn’t say that this is necessarily a bad thing for those of us who have to support and train users!

But having a single driver of human interfaces with computers is probably not healthy. Having a single commercial company in charge of human-computer metaphors ties in the majority of users to doing things the Microsoft way, as anything else doesn’t fit their trained knowledge of symbols.

Part of the problem is superstition: the symbol *becomes* the thing, rather than a representation of the thing. In my experience, the user doesn’t think about how and why they are performing an action, and what the mechanisms are. The number of times I’ve been told ‘I just click on this button when I’m done’. When questioned as to what the button is supposed to achieve, they don’t know. Such brittle understanding isn’t solely confined to computer use, I know, but it is one of the things that makes innovation in interface design so daunting a task. Yes, you can come up with fantastic and nifty ways of representing what the user should be doing, but unless it translates on some level to something they are familiar with, you will have an uphill struggle.

Most of the problems I get with the Quirky Application are through misunderstanding of the interface – symbols are misused, buttons are in odd places and perform strange functions. I don’t blame the users (even when laboriously cleaning up the sorry state of their data), I don’t really blame the developers (although it might not sound like it sometimes, when I find some of the more interesting features)- user interface design is a tricky skill to master, especially when you don’t have the R&D resource of a software monolith.

Where the whole social web software concept is helping, is that it is training users to think about what something represents and how to summarise it. Think about tagging: what you are essentially doing (if you are a responsible tagger, that is) is boiling down an entire page/site into just a few words that will represent that article/site. You have to pick words that other people will think of and might be searching for, and you have to think of as many possible alternatives that describe the same thing. As an English teacher I would be jumping for joy about this concept: a chance to demonstrate that a good grasp on language and synonyms is useful for *trendy* things! It is finally cool to flex your vocabulary.

What I like most about the phenomenon of tagging and collaborative works is the idea that it gives everyone a little more insight into how other people might be thinking. I’d be really interested to put up a site full of common and proposed user-interface symbols and see what they get tagged with. Maybe we can collaboratively brainstorm our way into a new era of symbols.. I’ll get right on that.

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For my work experience/community service, at more or less the same time, I was placed in a pre-school group, helping with the children. Mostly playing, if truth be told, but still educational playing, honest. Mmm Duplo ™.

Several years on and I found myself back in school, albeit as a lab technician. The school was a lot ‘rougher’ than the mildly genteel secondary school that I attended personally, and it was a bit of a shock to see how little respect the children had for certain teachers. Mind you, kids can certainly tell if you are confident or not and will take advantage of any lapse in discipline. One poor Indian lady, aged about 60 or so, was so cowed by her classes that I could scarcely hear myself think in my prep room. I resorted to standing at the doorway and glaring until they got the message. Poor Indira.

You would have thought that this would have put me off teaching, and to a certain extent, it has. I don’t think I would ever go straight to secondary school teaching. I think that would be something you have to work up to once you’ve found your feet.

I do, however, want to be a primary school teacher, in Scotland, on a remote island. Which seems a far cry from where I am now – working in Basingstoke, writing a ridiculously-ambitious piece of software, living in a ghastly town, in a cookie-cutter house. I long for the boundless skies and breathtaking scenery of Scotland. I long to do something useful, and I love teaching: whether it be demonstrating how to use some software, or explaining how something works. The joy of passing on understanding to another person is beyond compare.

Oh I know it’s not always a joyous experience. Nothing is. Many’s the time I’ve left a meeting frustrated because I’ve not been able to make myself understood. I assume that’s why some training is involved. It’s not enough to know your subject, you must be able to inspire, provoke and entertain your audience. I’m thinking this is where my drama classes might come in handy.

My mother trained as a primary school teacher, and did teach for many years. I find it weird that I want to follow in her footsteps, when we’ve disagreed on so many subjects in the past. But it’s not necessarily her that has inspired me. If I had to blame anyone for even putting the thought into my head, it would have to be the late, great Richard P Feynman. If I could only learn to emulate his talent for breaking the problem down into the simplest form, I would be a happy lady. I believe that anyone can understand anything, as long as the presentation is suitable. He had a knack of finding a common ground that most people could meet on.

I was lucky enough to be taught by a wonderful teacher at secondary school. His name was Pete Kaufman, and I’ve heard that he has since died. I mourn his loss, not only for myself, but for all the people who will never have a chance to be taught by such a truly great teacher. I don’t think many of us realised just how good he was. I certainly didn’t at the time. He was always the eccentric one, humble and kind, slightly zany, always had time to talk something over. He didn’t come from the traditional educational conveyor-belt – he did his chemistry degree through the Open University, which I think caused a few of the staff to look down on him slightly, but he did have the knack of making a potentially gnarly subject relate to everyday terms that we could understand. That is a priceless skill, and I only realise later how precious he was. Mr Kaufman, I may have disappointed you with only a C at A-Level chemistry, but you’ve left a far more profound mark on me than a grade could ever measure. I want to be like you.

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