Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: Interfaces

  • Edward Tufte, Resumes and 5 Years Experience

    In my previous post, I discussed the excellent ideas from the world?s leading expert on interfaces and design, Edward Tufte. Tufte encourages designers to maximize the use of space as a general rule. The problem is that white space can reduce clutter and highlight certain information on the screen or page. It also can present a hierarchy in which the information exists. Sometimes there might be good reasons for limiting the view of the data (as Tufte attests in his Challenger example). Let?s use the resume as an example.

    Employers usually want a one page resume for ease of scanning, but in today?s technical world, it is practically impossible to convey a person?s full technical skills without an additional page or significantly reducing the font or margins. So is two pages better? An interviewer is extremely unlikely to flip from page to page during an interview. So is smaller font better? A resume does not present simple biographical information. Instead, it presents how the job seeker organizes his career and goals. By definition, a resume is selective. It is not to the job-seeker?s advantage to present information in the typical ?job obituary? fashion. For one thing, if the employer can easily count the amount of time at a job, that gives a quantifiable basis for comparing this candidate with others. That is precisely what job seekers wish to prevent the employer from doing, especially when a job seeker?s proficiencies are gained on projects not directly related to his primary job function. On the other hand, if a resume contains chronological gaps or no dates at all, that also puts up a red flag. Therefore, the ideal resume should contain chronological information without a chronological organization.

    Before, the resume writer?s trick was trying to figure out how to condense your basic information into a single page. Now, just putting a url on a resume can allow employers to view as many pages as you want (That can be a dangerous thing of course).

    ?Must have 5 years experience minimum.? I?ve seen such phrases on 90% of the job ads, but I?ve been unable to figure out what it means. Consider the possibilities:

    5 years experience with the same job title? That is a sign the employer is not looking for competence, but stability and aversion to risk.

    5 years in the same field? So does time in school count? How about times when you were unemployed and working on portfolios/personal projects?

    5 years experiencing using the tool, (programming language, platform)? First, no sane individual uses a single tool for every task on the job, and an individual who does so tends to view business problems in a reductionist way. A person with 5 years experience using Robohelp tends to view every problem as a Robohelp problem. Second, anyone who uses a product for that long a time could be using an out-of-date version. Or they can be in the habit of using high-priced commercial tools instead of free open source tools.

    Having the technical competence of a typical person with 5 years experience? If that?s the case, then what about the person with 6 months experience who can do pretty cool things? What about someone with 5 years experience using a different tool but minimally competent on this one? At some point you are concerned more with an individual?s potential to do good work than what he has done (and that is good, isn?t it?)

    I?ve always felt that the hardest job skills could be learned by the right person in 2 years or less. So, by demanding 5 years experience, you run the risk of hiring someone purely on the basis of the historical accident of whether they’ve worked at a company using a commercial tool. Employers would like to think that skills can be assessed simply by number of years at the post. They’d like to think that most people can obtain the jobs they are suited for, and that job titles are relatively uniform across the industry. But job titles (especially in technical fields) can be misleading. Requiring “5 years experience” may simply result in weeding out the younger candidates most in touch with new ways of doing things. In the writing profession, proficiency and even ability increases with age. As a 36 year old, I?ve been writing seriously since my senior year at college (when I was 22). That?s 14 years of experience. But on a writing project, a talented writer with three years of experience could have probably done just as good a job.

    What alternative do I suggest? Employers should focus on skills necessary for the job, not simply seniority. By “skills,” I mean general skills, not simply familiarity with proprietary applications. If you limit your pool of applicants only to those whose previous employer used a particular application, you are reducing your pool of applicants (and probably having to pay high prices for it too). Oracle is completely different from SQL Server, but a person who worked as a database administrator on one of them could probably pick up the other in no time at all. The same is true for programming. I won’t deny that programming is hard, and that the good programmer is ten times more productive than the mediocre programmer. But a good programmer is not necessary the one who can program in the most languages. Once you learn basic concepts very well, the choice of tool, platform or programming language is almost irrelevant. Therefore, employers should write job descriptions that allow for a diversity of backgrounds rather than insisting on a specific job title or familiarity with a specific tool. Every job description ad should include three parts: Requirements, Highly Recommended and Nice to Have. In some areas (like management), seniority does indicate a level of experience working with different types of human interactions. But in technological fields, seniority is mostly irrelevant. After all, napster was started by someone under the age of 20 and the world’s first graphical browser was written by someone still in college.

    Another way to tackle the skills problem is to look at an ability to complete projects or master new challenges. Accomplishments and innovation should be more important than number of years with a job title. True, a person with 5 years experience at a job may face many challenges that make him/her a better worker. But a person without the job title may have faced similiar challenges in different professional contexts. By allowing the second kind of applicant into the job pool, you are making it easier to find the best candidate at the lowest possible price.

  • Myth of Seven, Plus or Minus 2

    Edward Tufte and Power Point

    Saw two extraordinary movies. Jane Campion?s Sweetie and Hal Hartley’s Surviving Desire. These are two films that will change your life.

    Great article by James Kalbachabout about The Myth of “Seven, Plus or Minus 2” (mentioned by Camworld). Also, How to list your site with search engines, cross-browser compatibility, the history of web browsers, and hiding css from a browser.

    Elearningpost.com has some of the best content I’ve seen. It’s nothing more than a group blogger–I’ve tempted to do something similiar. Also here’s a good index to instructional design models .

    Music: Yo La Tengo’s Drug Test (from Surviving Desire,) Phillip Glass’s Offerings, Ofra Haza’s Jerusalem of Gold, Orbital’s The Mobius, Angelique Kidjo’s Summertime, Basement Jaxx’s Romeo, Schoolhouse Rock’ s A noun is a person, place or thing, Jimmy Dale Gilmore’s Just a Wave, Not the Water, Sheryl Crow’s Safe and Sound

    Last week I attended a great one day seminar in Austin on Presenting Data & Information by Edward Tufte. Tufte has written three books on visual design and in fact attendees received copies of all three books, a great ploy if there ever was one. He’d probably given the same talk dozens of times, so it’s no surprise that it was full of quips and delightful anecdotes. Some thoughts:

    Tufte made a very unusual announcement that he would entertain no questions throughout his 6 hour talk (explaining that participants could post on his web forum). His motives are understandable.  With 200 people from different industries in the audience, it would be impossible to address all of the questions adequately. Although it gave him the freedom to present a huge amount of material in a brief amount of time, it also freed him from the need to make his lecture relevant to the audience. Most of his books were about scientific charts and illustrations; his audience wanted to know what he thought about websites and interfaces. The principles he enunciated were clearly relevant to today’s world, but he needed examples from today’s world to illustrate why interface problems occur. . When you attend a seminar on a programming or networking topic, you are interested most in understanding the structure and the architecture. But when a teacher presents a paradigm or a series of principles, you are most interested in how these concepts help you to analyze immediate problems. He accomplished this by giving past examples of failures and successes in envisioning information. But this is not enough. When an audience member mentions a new example, the teacher is put on the spot. People in the audience wonder, “do these principles actually help the presenter to analyze new and unfamiliar problems?” Without the opportunity for Tufte to do this, the audience was left wondering about whether these theories about visual design really serve any practical purpose.

    His self-published books are great examples of his own principles and great visual aids to his presentation. What I’ve read so far is subtle, skillful commentary. He gave historical examples of how writers/scientists were able to simplify information they needed to impart and how a publisher’s requirements on layout often hindered a text’s comprehensibility. He gave two unbelievable examples in his book, Visual Display of Quantitative Information. One involved Galileo’s tracking of sunspots over time. The original book showed one illustration per page, making it nearly impossible to discern any trend or movement. The solution: an artist reduced the images and put them all on one page. The second example involved the ill-fated presentation by Challenger engineers to persuade NASA to delay the launch. The engineers presented all sorts of minimally useful information alongside the important data, making it next to impossible for the NASA managers to reach any conclusions. Tufte put all of the data into one chart whose conclusion was crystal clear: O-Ring failures occur more frequently when the temperature becomes cooler.

    These are great examples, but he didn’t really address the simplification process that results from any “improved view” of the data. Proper labeling could do wonders, but that may not always explain discrepancies in data collection. The key question is how to balance the need to present complete data sets with the need to highlight the most important parts. (This is a relevant question to me while designing web navigation for the idiotprogrammer website). Readers wants “views” where they can see the most important stuff (i.e. everything) on a single web page or chart. On the other hand, they dislike wading through useless information. For this, the above article on web navigation is certainly relevant.

    Interestingly, the second half of the talk (devoted to web sites) was not particularly striking. Tufte presented some of the standard website examples (Amazon, etc.) without exploring the ins and outs of the sophisticated navigation methods the designers used. Several times Tufte recommended presenting information using N-dimensions, but he really hasn’t appreciated the difficulties of navigation and determining when is too much. The excellent www.allrecipes.com , for example, gives multiple navigation methods on individual pages, using levels and perpendiculars to indicate hierarchies and alternate navigational paths.

    One other bone I had to pick with his excellent presentation involved Power Point and overhead projectors. He complained that they were low-resolution devices and imparted minimal amounts of information. First, most of the best Power Point slides are jpeg’s imported from other high-resolution applications like Visio. Second, overhead projector transparencies are good (if only because you can create them with the copy machine). Projected images are bigger and often can be pointed at by the presenter. The problem comes when the speaker uses slides or transparencies simply as an outline of his talk. If that’s all the presenter is doing, then a single page of printed paper would be sufficient.

  • Jukebox Challenge

    For Christmas I burned music CD?s for friends and family. I also was able to experience firsthand the maddening challenges of maintaining an MP3 collection and the usability problems of Music Match Software.

    Now that I have started to download mp3?s like crazy, I have realized what a bother it can be. Most of these problems are in fact database and system management problems, hardly unique to music collections.

    The first problem is backup; how do you have a backup system for your mp3?s without spoiling the paths of your current music library? Okay, it?s possible to set up schedules for backing up, but that implies the existence of ?current? folder as well as ?archived? folders. But Music Match doesn?t really ?find? your mp3?s. Instead you need to tell what path to use. Music Match provided an impressive way to back up a large number of mp3?s, but then it assumes that you will continue to add mp3?s to the same directory. In fact, you will be relegating the files to another ?archives? folder, spoiling the path of playlists. To add more than one MP3 directory to your path, you need to manually select all that need to go into the music catalog. Uggh!

    The second problem is transliterated names. Many of the selections by singers from China, India and Russia have English transliterations, but there are wide inconsistencies in spelling these transliterations in English. As a result, one can have problems finding tracks by the great Egyptian diva, Om Kulthoum when you look under Um Kalsoum (real example). This may not be a big problem when most big Chinese singers use names such as ? Sammi Cheng? or ?Vivian Chow.? But what happens when the Asian market outshines our own, and such singers no longer cater to Western audiences? The solution is some sort of ?alias matching? application that can do fuzzy associations between different versions of the same name.

    The third problem is interface, one which I discovered with music match. I don?t consider music match to be a bad program; it is just extremely complicated. The interface consists of several different windows, and there are different ways to play the same song. Also, apparently a lot of mp3?s are inadequately labeled, leaving you many tracks under the name ?Miscellaneous? ?Artist? or ?Various Artists.? And the documentation, though quite adequate, seems to dwarf and even minimize the main application window.

    Another interface-related problem is that the program can only handle one playlist or burn operation at a time. I am constantly trying to compare what?s on different playlists, and the only way to do so is close one playlist to open the other. By itself, it wouldn?t be awful, except that the music player can only use the current playlist, so if you are making new playlists, you are constantly interrupting the music playing in the background.

    They have a separate interface for the playlist and the cd burner. Although the CD burner lists times for each song, oddly enough the playlist doesn?t do this. Although you can remove songs from the CD burner file list, you are not in fact modifying the playlist itself, only the list of burnable songs.

    With that said, let me say that Music Match seems to be one of the best products on the market today, which only shows you how hard the task it is trying to solve has become. I won?t even begin to touch the issue of digital rights management, something Music Match thankfully doesn?t try to incorporate into their program. But that is the future, and it is only natural that music companies would force software jukeboxes to incorporate DRM.

    Lawrence Lessig wrote an interesting piece for Slashdot. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/21/155221&mode=thread

    Here?s an interesting response to the article about the copyright controversy.

    “When something like “happy birthday to you” or “gone with the wind” becomes so much a part of our culture, how can we justify leaving its reins in the hands of the person who happened to put the words together – for an entire lifetime? The author synthesized it from the intellectual beams and trusses of our culture, and our culture then assimilates it. We whistle its tunes and quote its catchphrases, but we can’t use it to build larger monuments in the commons. With current trends, none of our descendants will, either – but even with a 75 year copyright, our children’s children will be grown before that right would become available to them. I’ll be dead before I can write variations on “Just another brick in the wall”, share a copy of the out-of-production “Swing Kids”, or put on a production of “Phantom of the Opera” in my neighborhood. “