Category: Humility

The Simpler It Is, The Closer You Look, Part 2

Humans do not think like machines. Machines do not process information like humans.

Which is obvious, yet the results are often not considered.

Making a machine interface that is intuitive to humans is really difficult. Presenting complex information in way that is easy for humans to read is really difficult. Here are some of the things which have to be considered:

  • How is the information organized?
  • What information are we talking about? Are we presenting flight schedules or grocery shopping lists?
  • Do regular users and new users have different concerns?
  • Do we need to emphasize if anything has changed from last time?
  • How can the information be presented so the expected reader can easily find what they think is most important to find, while also letting the publisher or organizer highlight what they think is most important to present?

Those issues are things I came up with just thinking about it as I’m writing this. There were and still are whole entire disciplines and professions devoted to this.

When I find something which is intuitive to use, whether it’s gas pump prices, a website, or the dashboard of a car, I try to stop and admire what was achieved. I also try to see what I might learn. If there’s a lot of information shown in an intuitive and easy-to-understand manner, someone put a lot of work into that.

The Simpler It Is, The Closer You Look, Part 1

The simpler a physical operation or technology seems to be, the closer I’ll be to worrying about material properties.

Every physical thing eventually goes back to a natural material. Even “synthetic” materials such as plastics, nylon, or viscose, eventually come from a natural material. And natural materials vary.

Whether a natural variance will affect the end use is often hard to predict. A few years ago Consumer Reports took a close look at gluten-free foods and found that one of the hidden dangers was arsenic poisoning. Many gluten-free foods contain rice flour. Rice is grown in different areas with different soils; and rice has a tendency to absorb arsenic from the soil (if the soil has arsenic; some soils don’t).

I used rice as an example, but every other natural material has equally unexpected variances somewhere. When I buy a good such as quilting cotton, there’s an unseen army of people I’m depending on. Someone grew the cotton, harvested it, processed it, and spun it into thread. Someone else took that thread and wove cloth out of it at a set width and tightness of fabric. And then someone after that dyed or printed the cloth.

The further I go back in any chain of assembly or manufacture or processing, the closer I’ll be to taking a very close look at physical properties in the material itself. If I have to do that, then I’ll probably start learning about how to specify those properties when buying, and how to test for those properties, and how often I’ll need to test.

The simpler it is, the closer I need to look at everything.

Useful Finds: Taking the time for a class rather than re-inventing the wheel, MS Excel

I generally avoid Microsoft Office if I can. It tries to do too much. And no matter how much I log in and confirm on whichever websites, if I am using Microsoft Office while I’m logged in to Windows on a different email than I bought the Microsoft Office license under, Windows and Microsoft Office throw fits.

Currently, I’m working on a project which needs Excel. I signed up for a couple of Udemy courses. I’m currently working my way through the first one, Unlock Excel VBA and Excel Macros by Lella Gharani. I’m only partway through and I’ve already learned a lot.

Thoughts About Technology: Our Brains Are Not Hard Drives. Write It Down.

I don’t like to admit mistakes. I think most people are the same way.

So none of us like to admit what we’ve forgotten. If we forget enough things, we start to forget what we’ve forgotten.

If it’s something I want to remember, I need to write it down. And if it’s worth keeping, I’ll eventually come back to it. Which means I’ll probably have to do some occasional reorganization of what I’ve written. Again, if the information is worth keeping, I’ll come back to it and it will be worth the time to reorganize.

It took me a long time to realize this. I thought it was just me, until I started to notice how few people keep notes on anything. And how much people struggle to recreate or rediscover information which I know they already had.

Write it down.

Thoughts About Technology: You Can’t Take the Humanity Out of Being Human, Physicality

I think part of the appeal of technology as magic is the hope that with enough technology, the messiness of being human goes away.

Except, it doesn’t go away. We’re all still human.

There are ways in which the brain and the body map onto each other which are unavoidable. I’ve read multiple articles about people blind since birth still “talking with their hands” when describing something to another person. There is still the need to show with the movements of the hands the movements of concepts in the brain.

In one of the early episodes of The Huberman Lab podcast, Huberman talks about stress. He says stress in the brain activates nerves for movement in the legs and the muscles used for speech. He notes this is why it is so common for people to say unfortunate things when they feel stressed. What he doesn’t note, but what appears in innumerable jokes, cartoons, and memes, is the need to pace back and forth when in an intense discussion.

There are also differences in typing something on a screen and writing it by hand on paper. It feels different as the writer, and research shows it activates different parts of the brain.

Being human means having a human body and being susceptible to the ways in which the body and the brain interact with each other and with the outside environment. We’re all always human. No amount of magic technology will change that.

Technician Tuesday: To Learn a Skill, Solve a Problem.

Don’t be afraid to try something. The easiest way I have found to learn something is to try and find a problem that you need to solve.

Mark KR6ZY, interviewed by Jeremy KF7IJZ, in the Ham Radio Workbench podcast, episode 19 “Listener Projects”, dated March 14 2017. Quote is from about 1 hour 53 minutes into the podcast.

I was going to write something else today. Then I heard this podcast the other night. I agree with Mark and Jeremy. If I want to learn a skill, the best way to motivate myself is to use the skill to fix a problem which is bothering me.

Mindset Monday: Use the Physical World as a Model for Your Expectations and Habits.

I usually leave the house with a coat, and a bag to hold my wallet, cellphone, and writing pad. If it’s a nice day, I might take along a digital camera in case I see something I want to photograph. I’ll also take a magazine or book if I might have some free time.

If I’m going to an exercise class I’ll take a bag with my gear for that class. A laptop and associated power cord and mouse in a backpack come along also, if I think I’ll need them.

I don’t take each of those things with me each time I leave the house.

When I install new programs on a personal computer, there’s often an option to add that program to the startup programs. Rarely are those programs a stand-alone executable: there will be background processes and programs they will start up in turn, just like I don’t take a laptop without taking a power cord and a separate bag or backpack to hold the laptop and power cord.

A personal computer with a ton of programs that start up with the computer takes a long time to start up. Similarly, if every time I leave the house I take everything I might possibly need, ever, it will take me a long time to leave the house.

When people ask me for help with their computers or other technology, rarely do they try to compare it to what they already know and do. Technology is a magical thing that they “don’t understand” and wish it would “just work.”

It’s not magic. It’s like any other tool.

Mindset Monday: Practice Makes Perfect, or At Least Better. Part 2 of 2.

This is a follow-up of last week’s post.

Here are some of the places I’ve seen recommendations to intentionally copy other people’s work to better my own practice:

  • A book on the modern atelier movement, where the author wrote a significant part of a four-year curriculum was devoted to drawings that are copies of works of the old masters. This helped the artist learn how previous artists had solved problems in their paintings.
  • A book on handwriting, which mentioned copy books. Those were books where people would write down famous quotes, their favorite quotes, and other quotes, and carry it with them. It helped them with handwriting practice. It also helped them to always have a handy reference of what had been written before.
  • If I look online, I can find several arrangements and analyses of famous classical music pieces, most of them centuries old.

In each case, the recommendation is to get better by copying particularly skillful examples of what came before.

I’ve even read comments that art has to be grounded in what came before, or it runs the risk of having no reference or meaning to the viewer today.

If I’m buying something I want to use, and I want it to make my life easier, ease of use and ease of learning how to use it matter. And for that, the designer probably needs to have spent some time analyzing and copying already existing works.

Mindset Monday: Practice Makes Perfect, or At Least Better. Part 1 of 2.

Earlier last week I opened a computer program I hadn’t used in a while. Even though it was a program I’d used frequently in the past, it took me a few minutes to get my bearings. I had to look through menus and find where the menu options and commands I wanted to use were located.

Fortunately, I was working by myself and had the time to rediscover where everything was located. Every program has a logic to how the menus are organized and how actions are named. I had time to remind myself of how all that worked.

But what if I had been asked to demonstrate this program for someone else. What if I had been asked to teach someone else how to use this program?

I definitely would need some time to practice.

It is not unusual to practice a skill.

It is not unusual for myself or anyone else, even though I know many people who expect themselves and everyone else they work with to load into personal memory the use of a program as quickly as that program loads into computer memory.

I believe this is a relatively new attitude. I recently read a book about couture sewing, which is very high-end and expensive sewing, usually done by hand. And the recommendation in that book was to practice on a piece of scrap fabric before working on the actual garment. It’s quite common for crochet and knit patterns to recommend swatching to practice the pattern with the yarn being used.

It’s not unusual in many areas of life for practice to be recommended, or even mandated. For high profile jobs in technology, classes and books will often recommend practicing before performing in front of crowds or clients. It is usually people who use technology only in passing who expect that no practice and no reminders are needed.

Technician Tuesday: It’s not magic, part II.

Yesterday I wrote about users who expect technology to be magic — and then find out it’s not. (That post was written and posted December 19, 2022.)

Later yesterday I was catching up on some old episodes of Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income podcast. Episode 604 is titled “SPI 604 – I Really Wanted to Believe This” and it’s dated August 19, 2022. It’s about almost exactly the same thing: technology is not magic.

Flynn uses a good analogy of an amateur photographer who buys a new camera lens and hopes that will make all of his pictures better. At best the lens only showcases the photographer’s skill at timing and framing and composing. At worst it becomes a distraction and another thing to clutter up the photographer’s bag.

Flynn calls this “squirrel syndrome.” I’ve also seen it referred to as “shiny object syndrome.” By either name or any other name, the hope is the same: I get this and everything becomes easier or better. Flynn even uses the word “magic” to describe this hoped-for effect.

But technology doesn’t work that way. It’s not magic. It’s only a tool.

It was nice to hear someone else say that. And a bit of synchronicity to hear that old podcast episode cover the exact same thing I had just written about.

On one side note, that was a good podcast episode. Flynn suggests that everyone do an audit of the tools they currently own and be really honest about how many they actually use, how many they actually need, and how much money they are paying for tools which are subscription-based.

On a second side note, I originally planned to write about product standards today. That’s a post I still intend to write.