ia play

A while back I read The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilised Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t

Back then I was in daily contact with someone who could have been the inspiration for Sutton’s book. Some of you will have had your ears bent about that delightful situation.

I’m far luckier in my working environment these days. My current boss and colleagues are all pretty much universally supportive, considerate and rational.

Occasionally I still encounter less pleasant folks but they are mostly at arms length which makes them far easier to deal with.  My most recent encounter sent me back to my book shelves to read Sutton’s book.

The book makes a distinction between people who demean others and people who are constructively argumentative and challenging.  Sutton describes two tests for spotting the former:

• Test One: Does the ‘target’ feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energised, or belittled by the person? In particular, does the target feel worse about him or herself?
• Test Two: Is the venom aimed at people who are less powerful rather than at those people who are more powerful?

Sutton argues that the bullies cause obvious damage to their immediate targets but they also damage bystanders, themselves and the organisation.

There’s a good section in the book called “Teach People How to Fight”.

I’ve been struck that through bullying these individuals can control what people do but they can’t control what people keep from them. No-one is going to voluntarily help them out.  People will let them shoot themselves in the foot.

Asking about a typical day is always an interesting question to ask in job interviews. All sorts of stuff gets chucked in job descriptions but there’s often no indication of whether that tasks represents something you’ll need to do every day or once a year.

A fairly typical day for me recently went something like this:

9am

Attend our ‘Knowledge cafe’ . This is an informal weekly meeting in a coffee shop with the project managers, business analysts, and knowledge managers. There’s no agenda, just a chance to recharge, share stresses and pass bits of information around. Nice, social and deeply useful.

10am

The rest of the morning is spent doing research, analytics, thinking etc. I might be buried in Google Analytics, auditing competitors, reading up on the technology or messing around with index cards, big bits of paper and a lot of furious hair twirling.

1pm

Meeting with content owners. Listening to them and their experiences/knowledge. Sharing IA insights. I used to find these depressingly familiar battles but I’ve tried to reposition them in my head. I’m not going to learn about IA in these meetings but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to learn about. Showing interest in the subject matter has actually helped make these meetings happier places.

3pm

Travelling to suppliers. They’re not too far but other days can involve lengthy treks to other offices.

3.30pm

Developers at the suppliers demo us the last few weeks work. We plan the next two weeks, flesh out user stories. The PM is usually there, often the web manager and accessibility consultant too.

The battle here can be to keep the focus on the important stuff. Making sure we’re working on simple, high value stuff rather than stuffing it full of bells and whistles. Suppliers generally just want to keep client happy, with the least effort. Mostly we have to be the voice of the user here, although occasionally the developers will argue than something isn’t user friendly (especially if it is complicated to develop).

5.30

Go home

The big shock for me, coming from a huge UX team at the BBC is there’s no designers involved, UX or otherwise. Visual design was outsourced, the details will be handled by the client side developer. Functional design and usability is the combined responsibility of me, web editors, business analysts and the accessibility consultants.

I produce very little documentation or deliverables.  Maybe a sitemap and some sketches for the content authors to think about. Some mock-ups to talk around, once we know what the site will look like. Mostly I think then talk.

Sometimes I”ll do whole days of each activity. Sit at home doing in-depth research, have all-day content workshops or be all-day on site with the developers. But more often than not days are mixed up like this. Makes me think of the polar bear venn diagram.

Related posts:

• IA deliverables
• The manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule

I’ve been reading extracts of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford. Crawford has a PhD in Political Philosophy, once worked writing abstracts for an academic journal service and now runs a motorcycle repair shop. His book, which began as an article in the New Atlantis, champions the virtues of using your hands to make and repair things.

He tells some fairly depressing tales of cubicle life:

“The quota demanded, then, not just dumbing down but also a bit of moral re-education, the opposite of the kind that occurs in the heedful absorption of mechanical work. I had to suppress my sense of responsibility to the article itself, and to others — to the author, to begin with, as well as to the hapless users of the database, who might naïvely suppose that my abstract reflected the author’s work. Such detachment was made easy by the fact there was no immediate consequence for me; I could write any nonsense whatever….

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this…

The good life comes in a variety of forms.”

via The Case for Working With Your Hands – NYTimes.com.

One of the things about being the only IA/UX/ID type in the building is I tend to work on a lot more things at once than I did at the BBC. As well as the e-commerce project and trying to get the new website live, I’m also working on (to varying extents)

• shared drive folder structure
• replacing various ‘company’ directories
• investigating care management systems
• a new library system
• thinking about the next phase of intranet/teamsite development
• supposedly a reference data management strategy, although I keep having to postpone this

Working for a charity is rather different from any of my previous jobs. In spite of having mostly worked for the Queen my current job is the first one that is funded by people voluntarily handing over their cash because they wanted us to help someone else who is in need.

That has a subtle impact on your attitude to spending the organisation’s money. I’ve become more interested in alternatives to conferences, historically one of my more extravagant uses of my employers cash. And on projects it makes me far more focused on value for money…which also helps with maintaining a “more is less” attitude to interface design.

I’m also conscious that I’m a big expenditure for the organisation, so I’m getting  better at saying “I’m paid to make this decision, so you really need to take advantage of my expertise here”.

This rings true for people who are clearly in one camp or another, and probably explains my diary nightmare:

“There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.”

via Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.

IAs are a bit of both, so I have a diary cluttered with lots of ‘short’ decision making meetings but I also need to carve out half day (at least) chunks so I can actually design or write stuff. The real GTD challenge for me is keeping my design work going in weeks where I only have scattered time here and there.

Get a group of UX folks together for long enough and the conversation seems to turn to the challenge/mystery of “how to get at seat at the table”.

I’m not entirely sure that everyone agrees about which table we’re aiming for but I get the impression it is the table where the occupants tell everyone else what to do (I’m imagining an Apprentice style boardroom here).

Most of us have worked closely enough with people who already have those seats so it is surprising that we still seem baffled about how to get there.

I suspect that simply having an excess of self-confidence (inspite of evidence to the contrary) will get you a long way there. Sometimes that comes with talent and sometimes it doesn’t. So I was interested to read this New Scientist piece about how we influenced by the confidence of others. The focus is advice rather than positions of power but it feels connnected.

The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are. And it spells bad news for scientists who try to be honest about gaps in their knowledge

via Humans prefer cockiness to expertise – life – 10 June 2009 – New Scientist.

I was surprised by my female colleagues reaction when I not only married but became Mrs Loasby. They were horrifed that I would “take the man’s name”. As my other surname came from my dad the objection seemed ill-thought through.

At least I’d chosen my husband and chosen to take his name. I never had any say in Harvey. Even more bizarrely they seemed to accept my decision when I mentioned that I would be the only ‘Karen Loasby’ in Google. Patriachy,  it seems, is ok if it enhances your brand!

Recent news also attacked  the Mrs title. Only very close friends and utility companies address me as Mrs Loasby. I don’t actively use Mrs and I’m baffled by a colleague who puts (Mrs) after her name in her email signature but I’m not concerned by the (empty) symbolism.

This doesn’t mean I’m in favour of sexism. I’m outraged that my grandmothers were held back by society. One was a civil servant and one a matron. Both were more educated and could earn more than their husbands but their careers were constrained by the attitudes of my great-grandparents,  one of my grandfathers and by the civil service. But their world seems utterly alien to me.

I never experienced any prejudice at school. The teachers were outraged when I didn’t study Physics at university. It was a similar non-issue at university.

At work my best  bosses have been women but I’ve had two awful female bosses too. Jen Rigby, Margaret Hanley, Julia Whitney and Helen Davies have all helped me greatly. This might just be a sympton that the BBC and RNIB don’t  discrimate against women.At the moment my boss is female, the head of IT is female and the CEO is female. This is my normality.

I suspect this is my mum’s fault. She was both inspiration and insulation and deserves a post of her own.

Lot’s of people are asking how the RNIB compares to the BBC.

My journey is much better for one thing, shorter and simpler. That has a surprisingly big impact on how happily the day goes. Judd Street is also a delight compared to White City- there’s coffee shops, restaurants, bookshops, and loads of parks. Favourite so far is St George’s Garden. Oh and the British Library and the Brunswick Centre are both just a stone’s throw away.

There’s something more office-y about the job. Office wear is smarter, people start and leave earlier, and weirdly quite a number of websites are blocked. That’s quite a change from having porn permissions at the BBC (to monitor the BBC’s websearch, of course).

I’m hands on again, in a very intense way at the moment. As the lone IA there’s lots to do. I thought I might miss the sense of community of a big UX team but the virtual community of other SharePoint and charity IAs has helped loads.

Pleasant surprises were the lack of locked down desktop and Firefox installed as standard.

Something I hadn’t thought about was the extent to which the BBC is a visual culture. At the RNIB  email is plain text as a matter of policy, sketching is rare in meetings and documents are printed in 14 point.

Which makes practicing IA a different kind of process and a topic I expect I’ll be returning to many times.

I’m knackered. What with work, freelance stuff, studying, and then trips to hospital with PW, it’s all been a bit too much.

I’ve noticed that being tired has made me more abrupt and more likely to put voice to my frustrations. It isn’t very me and makes me uncomfortable, but it is more honest and there’s some satisfaction in saying how annoyed you are, rather than going home and kicking something (hopefully not the chickens).

Sorry if you’ve been on the receiving end but the chickens are grateful.