Entries Tagged 'psychology' ↓

Catching up with my feed reading, I see that lately there’s been some buzz in the ’sphere around Let’s All Evolve Past This: The Barriers Women Face in Tech Communities. It is indeed a very insightful article.

In particular, I am pleased to see someone talking about the differences in handling sub-optimal communication and how it affects the whole ‘women in tech’ issue. The bit under the heading Men are generally very good at ignoring bad behavior is spot on.

But even though the article gives some good advice on building communities with better communication patterns, it does not give any advice to women as to how to help themselves to better cope with difference in communication modes. For example, it would help if more women were aware of these differences and would try to contemplate harsh things said by their colleagues in the context of the colleague’s overall behavior and character, and avoid over-analyzing these comments.

Quite a few of the problems faced by women in tech could be addressed by working on women’s self-efficacy. Among other things, people with higher self-efficacy are more comfortable taking harsh criticism, are more likely to voice their opinions, have higher motivation, and are more willing to take some risks and experiment. So maybe we should all be working on that. I, for one, will try to work on mine.

Lately I’ve been noticing that a big percentage of entry titles in the RSS feeds I read contain a numeral. Often these titles are of the form: “N ways of doing X” or “M best Ys.

This trend seems particularly pronounced in the del.icio.us/popular feed. As I write this, the top two popular bookmarks are Top 17 Search Innovations Outside Of Google and Top 57 Wikis By Rank.

Today I noticed Show Numbers as Numerals When Writing for Online Readers, one of Jakob Nielsen’s last columns. The summary of the article goes:

It’s better to use “23″ than “twenty-three” to catch users’ eyes when they scan Web pages for facts, according to eyetracking data.

Apparently writing numbers as numerals, instead of spelling them out, improves scannability of the text. Which is, of course, the exact opposite of what our language teachers taught us.

And not only numerals make your facts easier to extract from the text, Nielsen claims that numerals can also increase your credibility:

Even when users aren’t scanning for data, having your facts stand out visually by presenting them as numerals is an easy way to enhance credibility by making your page seem more useful.

This might explain the numbers-in-titles phenomenon: the “10″ in the 10 R’s to Apply if you Want to Succeed makes the title/article so credible that 668 people found fit to bookmark it. Scary stuff.

The need for a “proper frame” I talked about in this post is an important idea to have in mind when trying to get recognition for your work, be it artistic or not, professional or just a hobby.

In the case of artistic output, this might be quite obvious: a 9×15 photo print does not look as good as the same image when printed in a large format and professionally framed. Even a small black frame around a simple digital picture often makes a big difference. Look at all those Flickr pictures, if you don’t believe me.

But what is the “small black frame” for your professional, non-artistic output? You could try dressing to “look more professional” [1]. Of course, you should give as many good presentations of your work as possible, both in formal and informal settings. And send to colleagues/bosses/etc e-mails with bits of your output that you think can be useful to them is probably also a good idea.

If your main output is code, at the very least you should make it human-readable and well-tested (by unit tests, of course; stop bullshitting people with golden-file-based regression tests that you’ll never update again).

If your main output is in the form of a written report, choose a professional-looking font and layout (no more Comic Sans, no more than two or three fonts in the same document, etc). And, por dios, double-check your grammar and spelling!

Can you think of any more examples of how to better frame your work?

[1] Note that I use the concept of “dressing like a professional” in a broad sense. Where I work, “dressing like a professional” involves jeans and black t-shirts and/or looking generally nerdy. I bet those guys in the Ernst & Young building do not perceive our dress code as professional, though. So, when trying to look professional, study first the dress code for your chosen target audience.

The Washington Post set up an interesting experiment: they had a world-class violinist (Joshua Bell) play a famous Stradivarius outside a Washington DC metro entrance. Pearls Before Breakfast describes what happened. There is a video, too.

In a nutshell: he made 40 bucks in an hour, and hardly anyone stopped to listen.

The Post argues that nobody stopped because it was morning on a work day in Washington DC, and passers-by were all in a hurry to get to work. It was just not a good moment for them to indulge in art appreciation. The Post’s conclusion: we are all too stressed, we need to find more balance in our lives, etc. Breaking news, I know.

But the Post also mentions an alternate explanation, offered by Mark Leithauser, a curator at the National Gallery (the Washington one, not the London one):

Leithauser’s point is that we shouldn’t be too ready to label the Metro passersby unsophisticated boobs. Context matters.

I find this not only a better explanation, but also a more interesting one.

What would have happened if, instead of wearing jeans and a baseball cap, Bell would have been dressed as for a formal performance at a famous venue? What if there already was a small crowd planted around him? Would that validate passers-by desire to stop and listen, driving more people to the crowd? If there would have been some journalists taking pictures of him, asking questions and treating him like a star, would have people stopped then?

I think that if Joshua Bell’s “frame” during his performance in the Washington Metro would have clearly indicated that there was Something Big Going On, many more people would have stopped. It would have called their attention, and it would have also made it OK to stop for a couple of minutes. After all, what are a couple of minutes less work, if it will give you something to talk about at the watercooler?

(Article found via The Online Photographer, who writes his own commentary on the experiment here.)

The Online Photographer: Feet Are Optional:

What these straight-A kids wanted was for me to set the terms of their success for them. They wanted me to set up the hoop so they could jump through it for me. They wanted to be told how they could be certain of success. It was what they encountered everywhere else. But what I wanted was for them to set up their own hoop, or, better yet, look askance at the hoop and go, “Nah, not today,” and wander off somewhere and see what they could find. The fact is, you need to fail a lot if you want to succeed as an artist. That’s why the kids who were used to failing weren’t fazed by my classes: they weren’t threatened by the idea of falling flat on their faces 90% of the time. The good students definitely were.

I would go further: you need to fail a lot if you want to succeed. Not just as an artist.