Dan Meyer discuss various approaches to giving learners feedback on their answers. He suggests showing learners more about what their wrong answers might mean, to keep them thinking.
Speaking of literacy, I love the design of this “hyperlegible” typeface from the Braille Institute.
What makes it different from traditional typography design is that it focuses on letterform distinction to increase character recognition, ultimately improving readability. We are making it free for anyone to use!
The attention to differentiating the uppercase “B” from the numeral “8” is really striking.
Last July, Lena Alfter gave a talk “Typografie für besseres Lesenlernen” at Creative Mornings Berlin about designing for illiteracy.
As part of her master’s thesis, Lena Alfter found that people with reading difficulties don’t need special fonts in their learning materials, but better typographic design.1
Sebastian Greger has helpfully provided notes in English about the talk:
With everybody under 16 in Germany legally obliged to attend school, it can be hard to grasp that 6 million people (12% of the adult population) are functional analphabets and over 16 million (almost 1/3 of adults) have at least some kind of deficit dealing with written text.
So, designing inclusively is not about “edge cases”, as it is often reduced to by ableist thinking. And the impact on social participation, not least on the functioning of a democracy, is massive.
Lena illustrated well how analphabets’ manifold coping strategies contribute to hiding this fact in daily life; some even manage to get a high school degree without ever acquiring full literacy.
Translated from the original German: “Im Rahmen ihrer Masterarbeit hat Lena Alfter herausgefunden, dass die Unterrichtsmaterialien für Menschen mit Leseschwäche keine speziellen Schriften brauchen, sondern eine bessere typografische Gestaltung.” ↩
Kristina Rizga, in a profile of Renee Moore, English teacher at Mississippi Delta Community College:
By the end of the year-long project, Moore concluded that being a good teacher doesn’t come from following a rigid list of the most popular evidence-based tools and strategies; it comes from a teacher’s commitment to knowing and respecting students and their families.
A lot of this resonates with me, especially this:
Moore remembers that when the No Child Left Behind Act was enacted in 2002, the teachers at her school received letters from superintendents asking them to stop assigning presentations and research papers to English seniors—and to use that time instead to prepare students for tests. Once, an outside consultant arrived, armed with a large binder that included a curriculum and step-by-step instructions on how to teach it. “The materials were neither culturally appropriate nor intellectually challenging enough for our students,” Moore told me. “I used the book to prop up the aging air-conditioner unit in my room. When our test scores went up, the consultants took credit for it.”
NOTE: This was originally published as part of a post-course series of emails for the March 2020 cohort of my UX bootcamp in Barcelona.
“Keep in touch!” When I graduated from high school this was the popular phrase that everyone wrote in each other’s year books. I always hated seeing this written in mine because I felt it was a lie.
I’m sure you’ve had experiences where you’ve bonded with people during a time of your life and thought on some level that connection would continue, while on a deeper level realizing that the foundation you had wasn’t enough on its own.
Relationships take work, and tribe relationships are no different. Don’t expect others to maintain professional relationships for you—take the reins. This isn’t high school and if the cool girls aren’t calling you every other day it doesn’t mean they don’t like you or that you’ll never break in. Some people won’t want to stick with you and that is okay, but if you’re waiting around for someone to reach out, it is far more likely that they simply have life going on and you aren’t top of mind.
Reach out. Send them a funny GIF or an interesting article you read. Schedule a time to catch up. Make a specific request for something you need help with, and make it easy for them to respond.
NOTE: This was originally published as part of a post-course series of emails for the March 2020 cohort of my UX bootcamp in Barcelona.
The answer to this question is almost definitely yes. No matter how problematic they are, you’re going to have more opportunities if you have a presentable portfolio of your work and capabilities to share with the world.
Personally I don’t think this matters all that much. People like clicking a link and then seeing your work in a way they can scroll through. Guess what? If you host a PDF file somewhere like Dropbox or Google Drive, people can view the PDF in their web browser just as well as a website.
My practical advice: start with a one-page website that links to PDFs for 2–3 projects. Keep your branding consistent between the website and the PDFs. Make sure the PDFs links back to your website.
At a minimum, your portfolio needs to answer the following questions:
Probably not. But you never know which parts people will read as they skim. Some people will pause to take in details about how thorough your research was, some to understand your approach to ideation, some will only look at your visual mockups, some will want to see how you iterate, some will want to understand how you keep business goals in mind, and some will focus in on your learnings to see how engaged you are with improving in your work.
It’s hard to please everyone.
Design your case studies for easy skimming and occasional deep-diving. Try the following exercise:
Let’s try out a fictional example:
And what would we want a hiring manager to tell their team about you?
With your two lists in hand, check your case study. If anything doesn’t support the points you wrote down, change it to do so, or cut it.
Ask people you trust to test your portfolio. If you want to avoid some potential bias, trade portfolios with a classmate and run the tests for each other.
If you want to test for overall personal brand, try asking reviewers to pick five adjectives that describe you as a candidate after spending 60 seconds with your website.
If you want to test the quality of your content in a case study, give someone 30 seconds to skim through a case study, and have them write down a five-sentence summary of what they remember.
If you want to test the impression your case study is giving off about you and your work, ask a reviewer to write down five things they would tell their team about you after spending 30 seconds with your case study.
This takes time, but it’s time better spent than spinning your wheels in a cold sweat feeling worthless and like no one will ever hire or love you.
Remember: your portfolio is a project and all the same rules and methods and techniques apply.
Your first draft is just that. It will be shit and you’ll kind of hate it. But without a first iteration, you won’t get to make a second, third, fourth. At some point you’ll start to feel OK about it. That’s when you know you’re getting closer.
You need to have audience goals, design goals, and business goals in mind. What do recruiters and hiring managers need and expect to see in order to consider you for a position? How do you want to come across? What kind of roles are you positioning yourself for?
Don’t aim for perfection. Get a minimum viable portfolio together so you can start using it to apply with. Perfect will never come, start applying sooner than later so that you can incorporate what you learn from that process into improving your portfolio. And who knows? Maybe you’ll land a role with something less complete than you thought you needed. Why do you think so many designers have half-finished not great portfolios? Because they’re busy working.
Take a step back. Breathe. You got this.
NOTE: This was originally published as part of a post-course series of emails for the March 2020 cohort of my UX bootcamp in Barcelona.
You’ll be asked to set up a tracker in a spreadsheet in order to organize your job search and also keep the career services team informed about it. Maybe it will be a Trello. Either way, please do take this seriously, and make it a habit from the get go. It might seem tedious or onerous, but it works.
You will be applying to as many jobs as you can right now, maybe more than you think possible or necessary, but that is simply the work and the reality. Staying organized will keep you feeling more objective about the process, and also help you not apply for the same job multiple times. It will also help you remember who you need to follow up with, which you will be doing a lot.
The emotional labor of job searching is very real and extremely taxing. Staying organized will help you keep the search a bit at arms length. It’s a numbers game and there’s no point in taking it personally. You will anyway, but keeping the work of searching for a job a safe distance from your heart and your ego can help.
You are going to face a ton of rejection and none of it will be personal. Remember to remind yourself of this, and take time to remind your classmates as well. If you need a reminder and are having a hard time doing it yourself, call someone. Let them help you forgive yourself for taking it personally and find something to laugh about. The brutal truth is that no amount of needing a job or feeling like rejections are a reflection of one’s personal value ever helped anyone get a job.
Prepare yourself for the reality: maybe only 5% of the places you apply to will ever even get back to you. Even to let you know that you’re not a fit for what they’re looking for. You will probably never hear anything about why you were considered a bad fit, or what would have made your application more competitive. Interview processes will demand a lot of your time and emotional energy, when you even get them, and even then, you are likely going to get to the final stages of at least a handful of processes before ever getting an offer. This is just normal and nothing is wrong with you if this happens.
Even if one of your peers gets a job before you.
Celebrate their success and try to find out if there is anything they did which you can learn from. Let yourself feel the sting of jealousy if it comes, but resolve to pick yourself back up and redouble your own efforts. Don’t lose yourself in it, you are good and whole and worth it.
NOTE: This was originally published as part of a post-course series of emails for the March 2020 cohort of my UX bootcamp in Barcelona.
These are uncertain times and I will be blunt. Even under the best of circumstances, the UX job market is difficult to navigate. This process will likely do its damnedest to chew you up and spit you out. Even more than usual, you will need to gird yourself for a potentially long and draining process that tests your faith in yourself and the world around you.
I believe you will face the following contradiction in the coming weeks and months: you know quite a lot and have built many skills in which you should feel confident. At the same time, you are barely at the beginning of a journey, and will likely feel that way for another year or two. It’s your job to maintain humility about your current capabilities while also showing confidence in your ability to face new challenges with resilience.
While this won’t be easy, there is a built-in advantage that you have: your classmates. Everyone I know who is successful in their work has a tribe—a cohort of peers and mentors who they rely on for support and whom they are always ready to lend guidance or act as a sounding board. Your classmates are your first tribe. Hold onto them like an adopted family, forgive them their faults, and they will forgive yours. Any competition you feel with them is temporary in the big picture.
NOTE: This was originally published as part of a post-course series of emails for the March 2020 cohort of my UX bootcamp in Barcelona.
Congrats!
You’ve just finished an intense nine weeks of learning and working, and don’t even have a T-shirt to show for it (yet). If you’re anything like students I’ve worked with in the past, you have some sense of what’s coming, but are likely to go through a strong mix of emotions as you start to plan your next steps. You got into all of this for a reason, right? Well, the job’s not done and the next few months are critical—maybe even more so than the few you’ve just lived through.
Over the next week you’ll be participating in additional programming related to your job search. As a supplement to that, I’ve decided to try something new. If all goes according to plan, over the next few weeks, I’ll be sending you emails like this one to offer additional guidance and support. As I’ve never done this before, I make no promises about the results. Ultimately that will be up to you. But I do hope that these emails will offer some comfort during a hard slog, and that you’ll come to look forward to them.
As you read this, I have written only about half of what I have planned so far. This will very much be a work in progress and a learning experience for me as well as for you.
As I write, I have the following goals in mind, to support and encourage you to:
I hope that you will also share in these goals, and that you will send feedback, suggestions, and questions as we go.
Take 20–30 minutes to brainstorm and write down your goals now that the course is finished. These are your personal goals, so there are no wrong answers. They are also not set in stone. You’re writing them down now so that you have a record of what was on your mind in this moment, something which you can revisit and revise later.
Christian Lawson-Perfect explains himself:
Why?
- I can never remember π past 3.14159…, and typing “digits of pi” into Google doesn’t always lead you straight to a usable listing, so I wanted a place I could go to to easily get at least the first few hundred digits.
- Ever since I discovered it, I’ve wanted to write an implementation of an unbounded spigot algorithm for π.
- I enjoy buying novelty domain names.
- It was a fun thing to do for π day.
I’m a total sucker for this kind of thing.
Lovely work by Neal Agarwal, using a long scroll to the bottom of the sea to inform and delight.
Neal has some more fun projects at the aptly-named Neal.fun.
These word puzzles from The New York Times have been running for a while, but I’ve really been getting into them lately. I enjoy the simplicity of the concept, and it’s just as fun to play on my phone as on my laptop.
History textbooks should be written this way.
Sébastien Matos has recreated scrollbars from the Xerox Star in 1981 through Windows 10 in 2015.
An astonishing talk by Ethan Marcotte. At first I wasn’t really sure where he was going with his examples and stories, but his call to organize and his reflection that there are signs of hope already really got me in the end. I have hope because I know there are more talented, motivated, compassionate people out there like Ethan who believe in the ideals that the web is supposed to help us all collectively work toward. There are more of us than of the cynical and broken folks who are currently in power and benefit the most from the corruption of the web.
Thank you Ethan.
Charlie Owen at her best:
If React was used as one of many technologies, purely for non-critical user journeys, augmenting server-side rendered markup, then I don’t think most of the issues we have seen of late would arise.
There’s a lot of provocative stuff in here, but these points especially got me:
- These new devs were heavily trained by a combo of corporate-sponsored online materials, blog posts, video courses, and by the formation of bootcamps.
- The Web That Was, a place of chaos and malleability, was suddenly seen as an impediment to this process of training sacrificial developers, as it required acknowledgement of variety and empathy with the infinity of technology and human combinations.
- The Web That Was was seen as needing a lot more artisanal work.
- Big Corporates twirled their non-existent mustaches and realized that it’s easier to train people to use to work on a factory production line, learning a set of APIs, than it is to train them to see the Web as a precious resource that is inherently chaotic in nature.
- BTW, I’m not blaming developers in all this - under Capitalism you always need to follow the money, and web development suddenly became a well-paying career. It was always going to happen.
I’ve been working adjacent to web development bootcamps for the past several years and have watched as the classes next door have moved from Ruby on Rails (server-side rendered) to primarily React-focused. I remember the first time I had a conversation with one of the web development instructors on the way into work and discovered that he had never even heard the words “progressive enhancement” used together.
Charlie’s definitely right that although it is possible to use tools like React in server-rendered ways, that’s certainly not what’s being taught to students in the bootcamp settings that I’ve seen. And it doesn’t seem to be where so much of this loud vocal energy in a certain part of the community online is either.
I’m trying to remain patient while the pendulum finds its way back, but this time really does seem to be taking longer than I’m used to this cycle running for. And honestly, the last time I felt this way about a technology overstaying its welcome, was 2008–2017 when I was convinced that Facebook couldn’t possibly continue to be so popular and widespread for so long.
Matt Plummer writing for Harvard Business Review:
Here is how to assess the critical thinking skills of each of your team members, how to help those who are struggling, and how to know when a team member has mastered one phase and is ready for the next.
I like how his breakdown echoes the scaffolding in Bloom’s Taxonomy: “ the ability to execute, synthesize, recommend, and generate.”
I imagine these development stages would also be a good framework to reflect independently on your own skills.
Rune Madsen has done a great job of making his design courses available for others to peruse and take inspiration from, which feels like living up to the original purpose of the web. The whole thing is available on github.
Gaby Piñeda delivers an amazing deep dive into designing for Arabic-speaking audiences.
I’m glad that I can still be really impressed by the creativity and professionalism someone like Stéphanie puts into her website. Thoughtful touches in the writing, the illustration style, her positioning, and just overall presentation. I especially like the details on links and button styles.
And on top of that, she shares excellent links and useful resources on a regular basis. Very inspiring.
This looks fun!
There’s been a Murder in SQL City! The SQL Murder Mystery is designed to be both a self-directed lesson to learn SQL concepts and commands and a fun game for experienced SQL users to solve an intriguing crime.
A must read:
Even organizations with great meeting process inadvertently perpetuate barriers to full participation and access to democratic process. This happens through group dynamics of power, privilege and oppression that often marginalize women, people of color, queer, trans and gender non-conforming folks, people with disabilities and those with limited access to the cultural cues and financial resources that come with class privilege.
Whether or not you act as facilitator at meetings you attend, building your facilitation skills will help you make your meetings better, more inclusive, and more fully democratic! Here are some foundational tips and suggestions that can have big impacts on your meetings.
I especially like the “Community Agreements”:
This strikes me as thoughtfully and lovingly put together, battle tested. I’ve used some similar ground rules in class in the past, but am looking forward to trying more of this language in the future.
Howard W. French:
It may remain a little-known fact, but Africa has never lacked civilizations, nor has it ever been as cut off from world events as it has been routinely portrayed. Some remarkable new books make this case in scholarly but accessible terms, and they admirably complicate our understanding of Africa’s past and present.
There is still a lot of world out there, and a lot of history. The more I travel and read and learn, the more I realize just how ignorant and biased I am.
Khoi continues to inspire:
For years I wanted to be the kind of writer that could write more often, more quickly, more succinctly than I do. But throughout it all, I’ve been drawn back to writing the same kind of posts, which are sort of like opinion column-style essays of 500-plus words or so, and that always takes me way more time to write than I would prefer, if given the chance. Ultimately, I just learned to accept that that was the kind of writer that I am, for better or worse.
Donny gets a letter:
Your work is beautiful and your passion for our language is quite inspiring. I have never seen this sort of appreciation for Vietnamese by a Vietnamese person before. I’m glad to have found Vietnamese Typography and I’ve donated $5 via the support page. I wish you all the best, Donny.
This is how we can win back the web, one person at a time. Take some time to create something you care about and share it with the world. The world might just find you and thank you for it.
In the sea which was once an ocean, in the water once green, our pasts call out in a whisper. How many are the souls lost in these waters?
When ground retreats, and days pass, and weeks, where do we go? Have others been here before us? Will they come again?
—Barcelona 2019
Lovely interview with Amelia Barili in 1981.
Mike Caulfield has been working on teaching web literacy, in part as an effort to address misinformation spread and impact. These preliminary results from some of his classes, and his conclusions, are compelling.
Robin Rendle’s ending is the best part.
My answer: I don’t know.
Jeremy Keith differentiates:
So these two kinds of work require very different attitudes. For production work, quality is key. For prototyping, making something quickly is what matters.
Audrey Watters:
Design matters. Engineering matters. But so too does the context and the practices around technology. Culture matters. All of these systems and practices have a history. (That’s one of the key takeaways for you, if you’re taking notes.)
Why does the cursor blink, for example? How does the blink direct and shape our attention? How is the writing we do – and even the thinking we do – different on a computer than on paper, in part because of blinks and nudges and notifications? (Is it?) How is the writing we do on a computer shaped by the writing we once did on typewriters? How is the testing we take, even when on paper, designed with machines in mind?
Audrey has been working on a book, Teaching Machines, and gave this talk last month in Florida. I won’t try to summarize the whole talk here, because I think you should just go read her transcript. I’ll just whet your appetite with a couple more selections.
On B. F. Skinner’s influence (over Seymour Papert’s):
I maintain, even in the face of all the learn-to-code brouhaha that multiple choice tests have triumphed over democratically-oriented inquiry. Indeed, clicking on things these days seems to increasingly be redefined as a kind of “active” or “personalized” learning.
And just for fun:
“The most important thing I can do,” Skinner famously said, “is to develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us,” adding that he intended to develop “the social infrastructure for community – for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”
Oh wait. That wasn’t B. F. Skinner. That was Mark Zuckerberg. My bad.
See? I told you—go read.
Everything about this is beautiful. I love the deep cuts in the letterforms, I love the weird growths on the website. And I love the simplified black and white user interfaces in the illustrations.
Speaking of Lisa, her dissection of student needs vs. wants is withering:
It is obvious that the problems of the customer-service model of education continue to expand. The larger question is how it has become accepted wisdom that students require motivation in the form of entertaining behaviors on the part of instructors, that not to do so means being boring, and that boring is not OK and needs to be fixed. Regardless of what a student may need in terms of acculturation, self-direction, and scholarship, it has become more important that they be entertained into learning, then get a degree as quickly as possible to avoid wasting public monies.
Education should not adapt to such support goals, nor adapt to fit what students say they want.
Since I work in for-profit education, I see this bad habit of thinking of students as customers crop up all the time. I do believe that we should take a service-centered approach in supporting student learning. But I believe any input from students has to be filtered and interpreted, and that we have to rely on more sophisticated and less biased methods to determine what is working and what isn’t.
There’s an analog in user experience: designing for the user isn’t about giving the user whatever she wants. If you ask people what they want from their software, you’ll often hear very different things than you’d catch if you watch someone actually use their phone.
I learn more about improving my class by observing students work and asking them to explain things to me than I ever could by sending a survey asking them for suggestions. I do surveys like this, yes, but these are inputs I largely treat as noise that’s required by the larger organization—by people who aren’t in a position to do the boots on the ground work of figuring out what students need.
Lisa M. Lane:
An SLO is a Student Learning Outcome. Now, before you roll your eyes, be aware that when the History department was given the task of creating SLOs for all our courses years ago, we were given significant latitude. In our wisdom, we decided to make our SLOs skills-based rather than content-based. Instead of saying what content would be covered, what names and dates and events students had to learn, we would base our SLOs on what skills we wanted students to practice as historians.
Love this approach. Personally, I prefer to go a bit broad and overlappy at this high level, because it allows you to have a dialog about shared goals across subjects.
Cal Newport :
It’s hard to imagine companies of this size voluntarily reducing revenue in response to a new brand of ethics. It’s unclear, given their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, if they’re even allowed to do so.
By contrast, I’ve long supported a focus on culture over corporations. Instead of quixotically convincing some of the most valuable business enterprises in the history of the world to behave against their interests, we should convince individuals to adopt a much more skeptical and minimalist approach to the digital junk these companies peddle.
We don’t need to convince YouTube to artificially constrain the effectiveness of its AutoPlay algorithm, we should instead convince users of the life-draining inanity of idly browsing YouTube.
Maybe I’m just in a cynical mood, but I don’t personally see either of these approaches working. Honestly, anything that requires individuals or groups of people to shift their behaviors by first changing their minds sounds like tilting at windmills to me.
I’d love to be wrong about this.
On a less cynical note, I believe behavior is currently naturally shifting away from the excesses alluded to by Newport. Anecdotally, I see fewer students distracted on their phones throughout the day than I used to. And it’s clear people have to started to pay attention to the man behind the curtain in terms of advertising and content suggestions online. Give it some time, people know how to take care of themselves, and are surprisingly resilient.
Dylan Kane:
Most of my students don’t see themselves as mathematicians because they can’t see pathways for mathematics to positively influence their lives. What if, as one small step toward creating richer perceptions of what mathematics is and creating a discipline that has a more positive influence on humans, we chose to center “mathematics for social good” as a core part of what we see as math?
Manton Reece:
We do not need another social network with 1 billion users. Part of the problem is having so many users and so much power concentrated in one place. And setting out to achieve 1 billion users means it’s an ad-based platform that will inherently revisit many existing problems.
Agreed. And yet I am still bothered by the barriers of entry to alternatives, including Micro.blog. Apart from the usually-discussed technical and know-how barriers to entry (which honestly I find dubious on their own), what of social barriers? I see a lot of what faces whenever I check in on Micro.blog. How do we avoid revisiting this existing problem?
OMG I love these old postcards of the boardwalk at Coney Island.
The wood planks of the Coney Island Boardwalk were designed to accommodate two kinds of traffic: pedestrian and rolling chair. The sections with diagonal planks forming a chevron pattern were meant for foot traffic, whereas the two strips of straight planks were meant for rolling chairs.
If you ever visit New York, I really recommend the trip out to Coney Island. It’s kind of a bizarre place so close to such a huge international city. I recommend the freak show, a corn dog or two, and a stroll down the boardwalk.
If it’s nice out, take a nap on the pier. Don’t forget sunblock.
Amber Case:
When I worked in food service and in the mailroom, the uglier touchscreens were always easier to work with. They were color coded with bright, contrasting colors, making the boundaries between numbers or items very obvious. I found that the colors reduced mistakes. I’d usually tap the right items after barely even glancing at the interface. After a while, I’d only check the screen for mistakes at the end of the process, before submitting an order or printing a receipt.
Most touchscreen interfaces don’t use high contrast colors or locked, static buttons for basic functions. They bury actions under multiple buttons, and this leaves us dangerously hunting for the right button while trying to drive, or our frustrated passengers trying to help us get our phone connected via Bluetooth.
Derek Powazek:
This PageRank thing, they told us, was an “algorithm.” And, for a time, algorithms were all the rage. We were living in the age of the algorithm. And in all my client meetings and project plans, every time we had a decision to make, someone would say, “the algorithm will do it.”
The algorithm never did it.
I’ll let Dionne Warwick take this one:
Gotta get off, gonna get
Out of this merry-go-round
Gotta get off, gonna get
Need to get on where I’m boundWhen did I get, where did I
Why am I lost as a lamb
When will I know, where will I
How will I learn who I am