Noise Between Stations

Month: May 2014

  • Why I’d Love to See Graded Interaction Design Problems

    One reason I love bouldering is that it’s game-like. No matter how much experience a climber has, we’re all at a certain level with certain climbs (they’re actually called “problems”) that currently challenge us. It’s like playing a well-crafted video game: the levels you’ve finished are easy, the levels ahead of you are frustratingly hard, but the level you’re currently on is a good match of difficulty for your skill level; and you can feel the flow.

    8wng7

    I recently started learning a new programming language and I find it similarly game-like. Every new technique is a new challenge. Every new algorithm is a new challenge. The easy stuff is boring, the crazy theoretically stuff is frustrating, but the next chapter in my book is just right.

    And like video games, in bouldering these problems are codified. So I can say, “I can do all the V0’s in this gym, and I’m working on the V1’s” and other climbers know something about my abilities.* Codified problems exist elsewhere too. Here’s some to help people improve their skills playing Go.

    I’d love to see graded problems for interaction design. They would make it fun to solve problems, alone or socially, and communicate to each other our level of ability. “But Victor,” you might say, “interaction design problems don’t have a defined solution like a boulder.” Actually the boulders don’t either. People can solve the same problem different ways, but there are rules everyone must follow that give the game useful constraints. As long as you follow the rules and get to the top you’ve solved the problem. Some climbers are more elegant than others, and the same would be true in interaction design.

    * The Moonboard is like graded problem-meets-Github, a single wall with over 800 bouldering problems contributed by various route setters.

  • Report: Financial planning = happiness

    Pulling out some highlights of the Household Financial Planning Survey:

    • people who plan feel more confident about their financial decision‐making, manage to save more money, and feel better about their progress
    • only about a third (31%) of decision‐makers today report having ever put together a comprehensive financial plan. And just 35 percent of decision‐makers report having a plan in place to save for emergencies
    • Fed: devastating effects of financial crisis on the middle class: The median family… had a net worth of $77,300 in 2010 compared with $126,400 in 2007… wiping out nearly two decades of economic gains.
    • the crash of housing prices has been the single biggest factor that has reduced people’s wealth
    • only a third (34%) believes they will be able to retire [at 65, down from 50% fifteen years ago]. More than a quarter (27%) think they will not be able to retire before age 70, if ever.
    • 55% say “it’s hard for me to know who to trust for financial advice.”; 52% say “to me investing seems complicated.”; 55% say “I’m worried about losing my money if I invest it,” a significant increase from 1997 (45%)
    • half of household decision‐makers believe they “just don’t earn enough money to save regularly.”
    • American families today are less likely to be saving for their financial goals and taking steps to keep their family financially prepared.
    • The only area where families are more prone to save is toward a major purchase, like a new car, vacation, or home improvement project.
    • two‐thirds (65%) of decision‐makers say they follow a plan for at least one of their savings goals.
    • Forthoseathigherincomelevels,plannersputmoreoftheir income into savings than non‐planners and report having built greater wealth.
    • Among those in the $25,000‐$49,999 income category, 46 percent of those with a plan say they usually pay their credit card bill in full each month, compared with 26 percent of non‐planners.

  • Learning JavaScript, Day 4

    I recently decided to re-learn programming. Because I already know HTML and CSS the web is a fast prototyping environment for me, so JavaScript is the logical language for me to learn. Besides,

    1. JavaScript has stood the test of time and the community has improved it a lot
    2. It’s now on the backend too
    3. There’s a ton of new/cool learning resources
    4. jQuery

    At first I tried learning from a traditional book, from CodeAcademy, and by reading online. But I was only spending 30 minutes a day on it, and nothing stuck. It’s like my guitar teacher told me when I was 14: “When you start, you need to practice at least an hour a day to train your brain to think this way, or it’s not going to work.”

    Four days ago I bought the excellent Head First JavaScript Programming book and have been making my way through a chapter a day, obediantly doing all the exercises with a pencil in the book and in code on the computer.

    It feels great. My brain is so happy to learn something new and useful. After day 2 I was able to bang out a simple prototype of an algorithm that was too painful to do in Excel. I wish I had done this sooner.

  • 2014 is the Year I Learn JavaScript

    I’m at the point in my project where I need to prototype some software ideas. Doing it on the web is cheaper, simpler, and faster than prototyping a mobile app. And everything I need to do can be done on the front-end, for now. So I’m probably looking at JavaScript or Ruby on Rails, though there are other options.

    I went looking to hire a programmer or a small firm to help me. I even wrote a simple spec to make the task official. But it turns out my task is not complicated enough to engage someone else.[1] And yet it’s beyond my HTML/CSS skills.

    When I was young I taught myself BASIC on my Sinclair 1000, optimizing code to fit in 1K of memory. I kept those skills fresh in high school and college and even did a bit of Pascal work in grad school.

    But that was a long time ago. Since then I’ve been busy learning about networks, then design, then business, then being a husband and father. Just about every year I would wonder if I should re-learn programming, if only to prototype my interaction design ideas. This often took the form of, “Should this be the year I learn Flash?” The good news is I didn’t spend a lot of time developing deep Flash expertise.

    Why is 2014 any different? A few reasons:

    1. There’s increasing discussion about the pros and cons of unicorns
    2. When trying to fill an interaction design position recently I interviewed two actual unicorns. They really exist!
    3. I love to learn, and I feel a little tapped out of new things to learn in UX. Not that I know it all, I certainly don’t, but there’s nothing so new it stimulates my brain like it used to.
    4. Programming is such an exciting field these days. Stuff like Github, node.js, Rails, and non-SQL databases make it possible to make new things in new ways.

    So, it’s time to learn JavaScript. More on that choice in my next post.

    [1] And all the developers I talk to want to differentiate based on services. I hear from a lot of people that want to brainstorm, to partner on ideas, to think about strategy and process, and to measure ROI. For once I’d love to hear someone say, “All we want to do is write solid code at a reasonable price.” return to text