Best practice…for you?

Last week, I saw a post in LinkedIn about a “new” finding (from 2012) that “New research shows correlation between difficult to read fonts and content recall.” First, kudos for not confusing correlation and causation (although, the study was experimental and did prove a causal relationship), but the source article demonstrates an example of inappropriate generalization. To the point of this post, it also underscores the context-sensitive nature of content and how similar advice and best-practices should be tested in each specific context.

Hard to read, easy to recall?

The LinkedIn post refers to an article in the March 2012 issue of the Harvard Business Review. The HBR article starts out overgeneralizing by summarizing the finding of a small experiment as, “People recall what they’ve read better when it’s printed in smaller, less legible type.” This research was also picked up by Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath, which has the effect of making it almost as true as the law of gravity.

Towards the end of the HBR article, the researcher tries to rein in the overgeneralizations by saying (emphasis mine), “Much of our research was done at a high-performing high school…It’s not clear how generalizable our findings are to low-performing schools or unmotivated students.“ …or perhaps people who are not even students? Again, kudos for trying. Further complicating the finding stated by the HBR article is that the study’s findings have not been reliably replicated in subsequent studies, other populations, or larger groups. I’m not discounting the researcher’s efforts, in fact, I agree with his observation that the conclusions don’t seem to be generalizable beyond the experiment’s scope.

Context is a high-order bit

All this reinforces the notion that when studying content and communication, context is a high-order bit¹. As a high-order bit, ignoring it can have profound implications on the results. Any “best practice” or otherwise generalized advice should not be considered without including its contexts: the context in which it was derived and the context into which it will be applied.

This also reinforces the need to design content for testing–and to then test and analyze it.

1. In binary numbers, a high-order bit influences the result more than any and all of the other lower-order bits put together.

October 16, 2015October 16, 2015

Out standing in the field with ham radio

The BigFoot-120 course map — The Bigfoot-120 course map

I had the pleasure of supporting the Bigfoot-120 race, last weekend. For those who, like me, have never heard of such a thing, it’s a 120-mile race that takes place over mountain trails—in this case, the mountain trails between Mt. Adams and Mt. St. Helens in southern Washington state. I was part of the volunteer radio-operator team who set up 10 two-way amateur radio stations around the course. In that part of the state, there is zero cell-phone coverage so, as on my trips to Honduras, the volunteer amateur radio operators provided the only reliable communications to support the race as a public service.

The race

The race started Friday afternoon and the competitors ran on hiking trails through that night, the following day and night, to finish Sunday morning. As if running mountain trails day and night isn’t enough challenge, Mother Nature contributed a series of rain squalls on Saturday. This made it interesting for the runners who had to brave the elements as well as for the radio operators who had to keep their tents, radio equipment, and antennas dry. Fortunately, the weather cleared on Sunday to provide some amazing views of Mt. St. Helens. I admire the competitors for their ability to endure over 36 hours of these conditions…while running up and down a trail through the mountains.

The radio operations

The radio operations were also a challenge. We had to set up our equipment in the rain and dark of Friday night and keep it working throughout the passing rain squalls on Saturday. We used the radios at each of the aid stations to relay information about the participants’ progress to the race coordinator. As runners would pass through each of the stations along the course, their times would be relayed back to the coordinator to make sure every one was safe and accounted for. The radio crews were also used to coordinate the spur-of-the-moment activities that are inevitable when you have almost 100 people running through the woods…at night…in the rain…in October…in the mountains. The radio crews handled their challenges quite professionally.

The radio geekery

The relatively short distance for the radio signals to travel allowed us to use 2-meter (146 MHz) and 6-Meter (52 MHz) VHF/FM frequencies; however, the mountainous terrain required us to relay messages sometimes. Every station could talk to at least one other station, but no station could talk to every other station. The professionalism of the radio team made relaying messages very effective. I sent my wife some email using the WinLink station I took to Honduras; but I didn’t find out until after the race that I could have also used it to send race updates to the outside world. At least we’ll know for the next race.

This adventure was the first in a lot of ways for many people and we all learned from it. The professionalism of the organizers and volunteers made it a success and a great adventure for all.

Official photos from the race

October 4, 2015October 16, 2015

I’m a most-viewed writer

It was fun to see this in my Quora feed, this morning. The stats, however, show my fame might be fleeting with #11 nipping at my heels. But, for the time being, I’ll enjoy my moment in the spotlight. Gaining notoriety wasn’t a particular goal of mine, but I might as well enjoy it and it gives me the opportunity to ponder a few things before I dive into the rest of my weekend chores (ponder spelled: p-r-o-c-r-a-s-t-i-n-a-t-e).

Not many technical writers answer in Quora

This is a shame. To be more precise, the numbers show that not many technical writers answer Quora in the technical writing topics. It does show that almost 8,000 are following it, but I guess I was expecting it to be more popular, given the high quality of discourse between people in such a broad demographic. Even the topics by the most-viewed writer in Quora’s technical writing topics have had only 1,299 views in the past month. I suppose it could be because there are other forums that narrowcast to technical writers–LinkedIn’s professional writer forums are at least 2-3 times more subscribed, for example.

Why Quora?

I like Quora for its variety of topics, variety of contributors, and how they all get along. I like Medium, for many of the same reasons. Even as a pastime, I don’t mind answering the occasional technical writing (a.k.a. work) question, but I just don’t see them that often. A quick review shows that I’ve answered 18 technical-writing posts in the past three years. Statistically, I seem to have more fun (or, perhaps, just more to say) about flying and aviation, in which I’ve written as many answers in the past six months. In fact, my most read post is about an in-flight emergency I had while flying with a friend.

If it takes an in-flight emergency, or something with that level of drama, to make a popular post, it doesn’t seem fair to compare flying to technical writing. Honestly, flying lends itself to those types of stories much more than technical writing does. In all my professional experience, I can’t recall one life-or-death experience as a technical writer, which isn’t a complaint, by the way.

Anyway, check out my posts in Technical Writing—for the content, of course, not just to put some breathing room between #11 and me.

October 1, 2015October 1, 2015

Thinking of Honduras

Photo of Rus Rus Hospital and the Cessna 206 that is used as the Air Ambulance — Rus Rus Hospital and its ambulance

I recently got an email from the International Health Service of Minnesota, (IHS of MN) about their upcoming mission to Honduras. They are recruiting for this year’s mission in the last week of October and next year’s in the last two weeks of February. Unfortunately, I’m not able to go on either, this time, the message did motivate me to publish a short summary of the past trips my wife and I have supported.

I haven’t ventured out on many expeditions like the type IHS of MN runs, but I’ve seen enough large-scale deployments to know a well-run operation when I see one and IHS of MN runs a very tight ship. The dedication of their volunteers and their decades of their experience come together twice a year to provide an effective deployment of medical and dental services to people who would not otherwise receive them. While we aren’t able to go on the upcoming trips, we’re keeping in touch to be ready for the next opportunity.

With any luck, I’ll have edited and published all the photos and videos from the last two trips by then.

September 30, 2015October 16, 2015

What I learned by building a project from scratch – Epilogue

My last two posts described a project that I took from conception to working prototype.

Post 1 Post 2

Finding it in my garage gave me the chance to reflect on the design process through the lens of historical recollection. While historical recollection isn’t the most accurate process, given how memory works (or doesn’t), the self-timer I found in the garage is really just an artifact to focus my reflection.

Reflection

The first thing I realized was what I didn’t realize at the time. What I recall at the time was how each subsequent step (Idea, design, working demo, prototype, and beyond) seemed to require about an order of magnitude more effort.

The idea? About 5 seconds.
The sketch? 5 minutes.
The design? 5-8 hours.
The working demo? A couple of days.
The prototype in the photo? About another week.

That ratio has been reinforced in my subsequent experience as a software developer and even as a writer. What I didn’t appreciate at the time (or for a long time after this project) is how often I would try to be convinced that this wasn’t going to the case in this project (whatever this project was at the time).

Only experience would reveal that.

Lessons

Looking back on this project as a way to learn the lessons I listed in the earlier posts, I wonder if I could have learned those lessons at the time–while building the project. Maybe. What I realize now is that I didn’t recognize the significance of what I learned during the project.

Feature creep? Happens all the time and requires a constant vigilance and focus on the goal to avoid.

The illusion of a prototype/demo being the final project? Another element that has profound impact on the perception of the project–one that can work for or against you, depending on the circumstances.

“…but it looked good on paper…” Definitely a lesson on the importance of understanding how implementation details can pull the finished project away from the original design.

The problem with these lessons is that their impact is often felt long after the pivotal event. Feature creep? It always looks like a good idea when nothing costs anything (i.e. it’s just another line on the drawing or another bullet point in the spec). However, when release is delayed due to integration issues that result from the extra bullet point, the fingers point to implementation, testing, etc. everywhere but back to that moment in the conference room in which the bullet point was added–further masking its effect.

Agile methodologies

Since this project, I’ve learned a lot more about projects and project management. Looking back on this, now, gives me the perspective to appreciate how Agile methodologies do a lot to shorten the distance between events of each of the effects listed above and their effects.

Maybe that’s the lesson to take away from the reflection?

September 28, 2015October 16, 2015

What I learned by building a project from scratch – Part 2

This post picks up where What I learned by building a project from scratch – Part 1 left off. In the last post, I had designed and tested my device and I was preparing to build a working prototype.

It looked good on paper

Yeah. I didn’t design it to look like this, but that’s what you learn by actually building something. The original design, for example, had put that big, ugly, black thing on the inside. The big, ugly, black thing is the beeper to indicate that it’s about to take a picture.

You can’t really see it from these photos, but I had reserved space for it on the inside. Well, not for the one in the photo, but for the smaller one I originally spec’d in the design. The bad news for my prototype, however, was that I could not get the part I spec’d. So I learned my next lesson:

You can have it now or you can have it good

Two of the three legs in the project management triangle: Fast, Good, Cheap; pick any two. I picked Fast and Cheap.

I had to decide, did I want it finished soon or looking good. Clearly, I picked the former.

All put together, it worked (quite well, actually), but it’s looks left something to be desired.

If I had it to do over again… I’d probably make the same decision. The goal of this prototype was to test the functionality. I could iterate and find a part that fits (or find more suppliers so as to not end up in the same bind on the next iteration), but I didn’t want to delay field-testing–something for which looks were secondary.

Clearly, if I had different goals for the prototype, I might have made a different decision. For example, if the goal was to impress others and raise funding, I would have approached the appearance of the project differently–learning yet another lesson…

Keep your goals clear and in front of you

That says it all.

Finally

inside2 — The inner workings from the other side

The device worked quite well and I even used it for what it was designed a few times. While that’s an accomplishment in and of itself, the feature of the design that I didn’t (and couldn’t) appreciate until many years later was its durability–the durability of both the design and the implementation, in fact.

I recently found this prototype in a box hidden in the deep recesses of my garage (where things typically go to disappear). I opened it up and it looked like it did when I built it. The relay (shown in the photo above the battery) needed to have its return spring reattached, but other than that, once I added a battery, it worked just like it used to.

Unfortunately, it lasted decades longer than the camera for which it was designed. Nevertheless, the lessons I learned by building it are timeless.

September 25, 2015October 16, 2015

What I learned by building a project from scratch – Part 1

It might not look impressive, but this device represents a considerable learning experience for me–an experience that I hope I’m able to pass on to my future students. The only problem, which I hope to rectify after the fact, is that I didn’t recognize the lessons I learned at the time and so I was condemned to relearn the several times later.

The project

It started off simple enough. I wanted to build a timer that would wait 10 seconds and then take a picture. After thinking about the application, it occurred to me that the first picture might not come out well, so I added the ability to select how many photos it would take after waiting the first 10 seconds. Time to complete this step: about an hour.

Before I had even started, I was already learning a valuable, albeit at the time unrecognized, lesson.

Lesson 1 – Feature creep

Was the ability to take multiple pictures after waiting really needed? (Probably not.)

Was the cost of this change factored in the decision? (No, because I could do anything, cost was no object.)

The prototype

So with my [already revised] specification in hand, I set off to build a prototype. Being a hardware project meant collecting the necessary integrated circuits and other components and wiring them together on a breadboard. After designing the circuitry and ironing out the logic and state diagrams, committing all that to the breadboard was straightforward. With care and incremental testing, the design came together rather quickly. Time to complete this step: About a day–and I was about to learn my next lesson…

Lesson 2 – The prototype is not the product

It was very easy to get ahead of myself at this point. I had a working prototype. My design was validated. I was heading for home plate.

Not so fast. I was really just heading for first base. I was nowhere near having something I could put in my camera bag, let alone let anyone else use.

The real prototype

But wait! Didn’t I just finish the prototype? Nope. That was just the breadboard–more of a working demo.

Bummer.

The real prototype had to look like something I could actually use. In this step, I had to package it into something that not only functioned, but it had to function in the real world. I needed to give it the physical design some attention.

While it would be some time before I actually studied user-centered design, looking back, I had the right idea. I knew the audience (me) very well and I knew the application, so I laid out the user interface and set to make it happen. I was about to learn my next lesson…

Lesson 3 – A working demo is not a prototype

My breadboard project was really just a working demo. The prototype (as in a working example of the product in, more-or-less, product form) was another level of complexity.

September 24, 2015October 16, 2015

At the speed of thought

I returned from a visit to my parents, recently. My parents live in another state–far enough away that it’s difficult to visit them more than once or twice a year.

My father has had Alzheimer’s for several years. For the past few visits, I have met a new father on each visit–the same person, of course, but, at the same time, a different one.

On this trip, I resisted the urge to look for the father from my last visit so I could get to know my new one. While I miss the father I knew, it was rewarding to get to know the one I have, now. He’s just as special to me as the person I saw the last time; but this one is special in his own way.

One evening, as he and I sat at the dinner table with my wife and my mother, he considered a bowl of vegetable soup for a moment before picking up his fork to eat it. This was a bit curious to me. As the soup ran between the tines of his fork with each bite, my mother tried, unsuccessfully, to convince him to use his spoon. My wife observed that the fork was actually the perfect utensil for the task he was trying to accomplish–he wanted to eat the vegetables first. After he ate all the vegetables, he picked up his spoon and finished his soup.

He knew what he was doing all along. Once we were able to move at the speed of his thought, things went much smoother for everyone.

I’m glad I had a chance to meet this father of mine. I’m still learning from him and I look forward to meeting the next one and what he’ll teach me.

September 1, 2015October 16, 2015

Writing it down

I added another goal to my blog vision project, today: to post my online resume and portfolio. It’s a goal that’s been rattling around for a while, but I’ve never actually got around to writing it down.

That this goal has been rattling around for so long (maybe 6 years, or more if I’m really honest) illustrates the importance of making things visible.

Reflecting on why it took so long to materialize, I came up with the following tips to prevent the next goal from taking so long.

Clear and well-defined goals are easier to commit to

Not knowing how to accomplish the goal makes it hard to commit to. Sure, I could have started with something like “have a great portfolio” as a goal (which was where I was 6 or so years ago, by the way); however, at the time, I didn’t have a clear idea about how to make that happen. To commit then would have just been frustrating and defeated the goal of having goals–actually accomplishing something. It could have been an aspiration, perhaps, but it wasn’t ready to be a goal.

“Portfolio” was the complicating word, in this case. I couldn’t think of anything that I had for a portfolio. In the intervening years, I’ve talked to people who frequently review portfolios and my definition of portfolio started to evolve. Once I redefined portfolio to mean something more along the lines of an annotated resume, that opened up the possibilities to something I could envision and see a path towards. I had a goal I could commit to writing.

Do it if it’s important. Don’t do it if it’s not.

Priorities are important.

While I wanted to have a portfolio (of any kind) since I finished my MS degree (2009), it hasn’t always been the most important thing on the list of things to do. Over the past few years, I would take it from the shelf, review it, and, until recently, put it back on the shelf in deference to something more important or, at least, more urgent.

In Agile Development terms, it never made it off the backlog.

Yesterday, however, it was well defined and with a clear path to completion, and it was important, so it’s now a goal. Had I made it a goal any earlier, it would have resulted in a lot of wasted effort (non achievable) and likely resulted in more problems (by neglecting what was important at the time).

A goal without a plan is just wishful thinking

Having a goal without a plan is what happens between the times you decide on a goal and create the plan to accomplish it. During this period, wishful thinking is a good thing, as long as it motivates a plan and the action to accomplish it. Stopping at the wishful-thinking phase, however, won’t get it done.

So, it’s on the list and I have a plan. Now, to make it happen!

August 30, 2015September 26, 2015

Unleash the initiative

This morning on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS (Fareed Zakaria GPS – Aug 30, 2015), U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal (Ret.) was interviewed about leadership in the context of Gen. McChrystal’s recent book. His interview starts at [10:36:10], a little over halfway into the program.

I liked how Gen. McChrystal started by clearing up a misconception about leadership in the U.S. military–one that I’ve heard from people with no military background and summarized from the transcript here:

Zakaria: …[in] the U.S. Army, you give orders, people listen, your job is to appear imposing.

McChrystal: …everybody thinks that a sergeant tells you to do something and you immediately do it. … In combat, soldiers are much more frightened of the enemy than they are of the sergeant. So they do things for their leaders and their comrades. …so the ability to influence and persuade and build confidence in you as a leader and in what they’re doing becomes the key task.

Zakaria: So, when you looked at…successful examples of leadership, what you found…was a guy who really was able to win the trust of people?

McChrystal: You win the trust of people, and then you unleash their initiative…

Unleash their initiative.

That has a nice ring to it. He went on to describe how to accomplish this.

Zakaria: Somebody wants to be a leader in their organization, in life. What advice would you give?

McChrystal: One, it’s going to take personal discipline… The next thing is empathy. …those core, fundamental, almost value-like traits are the key.

It’s nice to hear that empathy is a core, fundamental, trait…even for an Army general.

Now, to go and unleash some initiative!