Moana declares her desire to explore beyond the bounds her family defined for her in “How Far I’ll go”.

Tevye wishes to come upon a small fortune and escape the toil of a dairy farmer when he sings “If I were a Rich Man”.

Stakeholders often do this too, though not usually in the form of a song. I once had a stakeholder tell me that she hadn’t been a product manager for very long, but she had deep knowledge of the business we were working in. She wanted the team to take her knowledge into account when making product decisions.

If you can identify someone’s “I wish” song and support it, they will be your biggest ally.

It’s often unnatural to do this sort of lateral thinking, but it’s incredibly useful. Many of us have seen double diamond diagrams describing the design process, but the diagram that resonates with me most is a herringbone model. It shows individual paths, and it reframes the idea of failure. Someone presented this at a talk, and I would credit them, but I can’t recall who it was.

We start with a problem to solve and try a few ideas, then test them. Often we learn that the idea doesn’t work. We try new ideas.

Sometimes when testing an idea, it doesn’t entirely work, but it spawns additional ideas that branch off from it. If things work out, we refine an idea that leads to a solution.

It’s useful in any sort of problem solving, and it’s especially useful when things look bleak.

For example, when the US Digital Service is hollowed out with loyalty tests and turned into a shell for the Department of Government Efficiency with the intent of dismantling federal agencies in the same way, it gives me hope to remember that one or even many blocked paths don’t mean it’s the end of the broader goal of delivering better government services.

Jennifer Pahlka recently cited “an assault on the modern state as we know it” and ended her post saying:

Our job now is to be changed, to reflect, to become better. We can’t do that without disagreement, without the imagination that comes from engaging across division. When we come out the other side of this, Dems can’t be who we are today. We can’t retreat again into a procedure fetish that serves no one, to start. Hell, the public isn’t putting us back in power if that’s our plan. We must find a new way.

Someone told me in college, “You don’t have to know what you’re doing for life. You just have to know what you’re trying next.”

When describing the direction an object is moving, does one describe it from the object’s point of view, or the observer’s point of view?

In weather forecasts, the common standard is to describe the direction from which the wind originates. That is, a north or northerly wind blows from the north to the south. If one is facing north into a northerly wind, one gets hit in the face with it. I always thought this was backwards because I took the perspective of the wind and thought a northerly wind was blowing to the north. The “-ly” especially made it sound like an adverb that described the wind’s action.

Interestingly, in surfing, the standard takes the opposite approach: the direction describes the way the wind is going. An onshore wind blows toward the shore. An offshore wind blows off the shore.

Is it more intuitive for most people to think from the perspective of their faces getting blasted rather than from the perspective of the wind itself? Perhaps. I’m curious to know more about the origins of the conventions for wind direction.

Another similar divide is how to describe scroll direction on a laptop trackpad or computer mouse. Currently Mac OS uses the term “natural” to mean that the content follows the direction one is moving one’s finger(s) while scrolling and sets this as the default. Windows defaults to the opposite approach. The naming and default of “natural” scroll direction is controversial. My wife embraces natural scroll direction on her laptop. I still think of this as not at all “natural” because I grew up using computers in the late 80s and early 90s where the metaphor was that the scroll wheel moved the viewport or the on-screen scrollbar, rather than moving the content directly. Tedium gives a good deep dive on the history and points out that

Essentially, this default isn’t for you; it’s for your kids, who presumably will use a touchscreen long before they ever touch a trackpad.

A few years later, thanks to the efforts of early US Digital Service and 18F pioneers, I was able to do user experience work with government agencies and help Veterans get access to benefits, help hospitals and medical clinics understand and navigate federal quality incentive programs designed to improve their practices, and allow more Medicare enrollees to make use of their data in third-party apps. The public benefit in this work was pretty clear.

Now I’m doing work in the private sector again and longing for that social impact. Recently, I was co-facilitating a user research session with a front line employee who uses the company-owned software I’m working on. When planning the research, we were struggling to find participants since the population that uses this software in this way was small. This participant caught me and my colleague off guard when she said, emphatically,

Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you for actually being a company that listens to the small fries. I’ve never wanted to go up the corporate ladder. I’ve always wanted to stay in the field, but the fact that you guys actually listen to us, because we’re here constantly, just shows that you actually genuinely care about what we do and what we’re all about.

She reminded me that In user experience, we get to amplify the voices of those who are not always heard by decision makers in their organizations. And we get to make the software they have to use every day work better for them.

Here’s one thing I knew about myself but recently realized in a more profound way: I’m good at focusing and digging in and persevering. I’m less good at knowing when it would be helpful to stop and zoom out and try a new approach. Years ago when I visited the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, I spent the entirety of my 2 hours there in the Wright Brothers exhibit, with a brief look at the Gossamer Condor. For the record, I have no regrets about this, but it does illustrate this tendency. I also see it in my 5-year-old son. Since day care, he has had an extraordinary ability to focus on an object or a book. He won the book worm award at his pre-K class. And I also saw this tendency in my cousin once when we went to an art museum together – it was maybe the first time I experienced going to a museum and having to wait periodically for someone who was moving through it slower than I was.

A year ago, I took up rock climbing with my son. I find it rewarding since completing a challenging route requires strategy, technique, and strength – usually in that order. And one gets better at all of those things slowly with practice. Yesterday I went climbing for the first time in two weeks. I was working on a route that was grip-intensive. I was trying a few different approaches to it, but none helped me make progress. I kept falling on the second move. One thing that climbing instructors recommend is to rest between attempts and also alternate between routes that require different muscle groups. So next I worked on another route that I thought was going to spare my forearms from tiring out more. But when I was on the route, I realized it was more grip-intensive than it looked. I got to the last hold. I had a solid technique and strategy, but I just couldn’t grip it with my tired arm. It was clear to me that if I hadn’t been tiring out my forearms the entire session, I would have been able to finish it.

So this is what I’m thinking about as I approach the year: stepping back and observing how I approach work and hobbies and connecting with friends and family, maybe not getting stuck as much, and bringing outside perspectives in more. Mindfulness meditation has helped. And when I was doing more people management, it put me into this outside perspective from the other end.

Coach Beard: “Coach, you sure it’s smart to invite fans to our practices?”
Ted: “It’s their team. We’re just borrowing it for a little while.”

I thought this was a humble and smart way to approach their relationship to the team. It’s also a responsible way to approach work with clients. You might be designing and building a thing, and they’ll have to continue building it and maintain it or hire someone else to. If you’re lucky, you get to go beyond the product work and collaborate to shape the culture of the team and the strategy for what they’re doing. And they carry on after you. Think about setting them up for success.

Problem

My team has used Confluence for their internal documentation. It’s okay, but some things about it are rough.

By default, Confluence uses a page title (pretty) URL format like https://confluence.myorganization/display/space/Early+2022+Change+Log. This means if someone changes the page title, old links people have shared to the page will be broken. This happens a lot in my world.

However, if a page title contains one of these special characters % & ? / \ ; ” § +, Confluence displays a URL by Page ID, which is persistent.

Solutions Confluence would have to implement

1. Make the browser display the page ID instead of the page title in the address bar.
2. Offer a setting to default to either page title or ID in URLs

DIY hacky solution

When I make a new Confluence page, I put a ; at the end of the page title, forcing Confluence to display the Page ID (instead of the page title) in the address bar.

I am both proud and ashamed of this.

Can this be effective? Yes. Is there a cost to it? Also yes. It kind of ruins your walk. And it’s hard to turn this off once it becomes a habit. Once I was talking with my therapist about how I tend to ruminate on problems, and she asked if it worked. I think she was asking rhetorically as if she expected me to say no. Also, I really wanted to say no, but the truth was that I have sometimes come up with useful solutions this way. However, I usually find it draining, and much of the time, it doesn’t lead to anything useful.

I learned about the psychology concept of time perspectives a while ago. In that framework, we’re all born focused on the present, and the purpose of education is to make us more future focused. Success in most fields is tied to future focus.

Once you’re in this future focused career path, the most visible rewards (promotions, raises, recognition in the form of kudos) reinforce that future focus, and the costs or sacrifices you make to do it are subtle and easy to ignore. I think I’ve had the same New Year’s resolution for probably 10 years of spending more time with friends and family. A former manager recommended I read Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, and I put that off for a while but eventually did. It was a helpful wakeup call. I make some progress with being more focused on the present here and there. I also backslide occasionally. I find that spending time with my kid is a great way to pull myself back to the present. Also, we definitely experience time-perspective-related conflict when I’m trying to get him out the door to preschool and he stalls to read more books or play with his toys.

Take for example, the word “hot” when describing food. It could mean it has a high temperature or it contains capsaicin. Then there’s “spicy”, which is not really much better because it could mean well seasoned or containing capsaicin. In Spanish, we have “picante” which only refers to the capsaicin sense of the word, versus “caliente”, referring to temperature. I used to think English didn’t have this distinction, but then I saw “piquant” used in a cookbook, and now I use that all the time. Most of the time, people don’t know what I’m talking about, so I get to explain it.

Then there are “flat head” screws. This could mean either that they are driven with a screwdriver that has a straight line end to it (versus one in the shape of a plus sign, a.k.a. Phillips, or some other shape), or that its head is flat in profile and it is meant to be counter sunk. Who came up with this extremely confusing term in the world of screws? I’ve heard “standard” used to refer to the type that is driven with a straight-line end screwdriver, but “standard” is not very descriptive.

And there’s “biweekly”, which could mean “every two weeks” or “twice a week”. I just avoid this word and use three words instead.

Don’t get me started on “flammable” and “inflammable”.

• Jam or preserves, some kind of berry. Low sugar but not with fake sugar. Not Polaner All Fruit. World of Chia brand is good.
• Chips, no milk products, no vinegar. Russet potato, sweet potato or beet chips if available. Lays don’t count. Otherwise, tortilla chips are okay

I refine these list items over time as my wife completes the task and I uncomplete it when we run out of the thing again. Based on what actual item we got, I might refine the list item after I try it. So the descriptions tend to grow over time, showing the paths where we clarified something.

Aside from the fact that I’m picky and it took me a long time to realize it, my point is that this is a tricky scenario in which to communicate a choice. The grocery store changes what they carry periodically, and sometimes my wife will go to a different store than usual. In any case, I don’t see the whole list of options the store has when adding to the grocery list. Also, I’m usually okay with the same brand of chips or jam every time, but my wife likes to try new things.

When making a purchase in the store, a shopper gets feedback about what options are available and gets to look at ingredients, prices, packaging, quantities, ripeness, and whatever else they have in mind. When preparing a list ahead of time, there is none of this feedback. There’s the option for the person shopping to communicate with the person who made the list item and provide this feedback and ask more questions, but neither of us want to do this.

So I end up with conditional logic and verbose explanations that I try to make as unambiguous as possible to avoid requiring clarifications like the one Sally has to make with the server when they ask what Sally means by “if [the whipped cream] is out of a can, then nothing” (did she mean no pie or just no cream?). It starts to resemble a decision tree and defensive documentation.

One solution to the grocery list problem is just list “jam” or “chips” and be happy with what you get. But in some situations like tech support tickets, the same scenario (little opportunity for real-time feedback) exists and you have to be exact in order to solve the problem. In these cases, I also don’t want to have to go back and forth any more than is necessary, so I include as much relevant detail initially as possible – software and operating system versions, screenshots / screen recordings, exact error messages, and sometimes a statement like “Please do A if possible, but otherwise, do B”. Stack Overflow has a help article on how to ask a good question, and they link to this from the question form since a well-written question makes a huge difference.

Also, like Sally, I like what I like.