I’ve been reading Aarron Walter’s Designing for Emotion in small bites for a couple of weeks now.  I would consider it essential reading for anyone trying to understand the discipline of design, especially within a psychological context.  One line in particular stood out almost immediately:

*”people will forgive shortcomings, follow your lead, and sing your praises if you reward them with positive emotion.”*

I’ve tried to put some of the ideas from the book into practice on my Saturday sessions with my kids.  They are little bubbles of emotion, and are in some ways a perfect test cohort.  They are without a doubt the most wonderful part of my life, even when they are trying to teach me things that I am slow to learn.

Aside: I have been told and firmly believe that there is “work” that a person undertakes when raising children that is not achievable in any other way.  Not by caring for a pet, or an aging parent, or a sick friend, or even a life-partner.  It is the intersection of ultimate responsibility and limitless change; for while the love we pour into any of those aforementioned may equal those we give to our children, the rate of change is not the same.  Children are in a constant state of flux, more rapid than most adults are comfortable keeping up with.  There may be those who can keep up with the rate of change of children for a while.  But over the long run, its best to accept that they will change faster than we can adjust to.

Saturday mornings are a time for me to focus on my children (6 and 3), as we are left to our own shenanigans while their mom is teaching a Zumba class.  My most basic goal is to keep the kids happy and engaged for the 2-3 hours that we have, without completely trashing the house in the process.  We are getting it half right.  The house is usually trashed by the end.  But they’re engaged for sure so I can live with some collateral damage.

For the past few weeks we have been designing and working on 1) a dragon/dinosaur costume, made of discarded cardboard boxes from holiday gifts and leftover decorations from a recent birthday party, and 2) a set of dowel / duct tape / pipe insulation swords.  The costume idea sparked from watching the New Year’s parade in Burlington, where each year there is a parade of Chinese-style dragons.

Strategy: Like any aspiring acolyte in the Agile / Lean UX / UX space, I set about building a minimal viable dragon costume.  I wanted to couple both the experience of building it and the resulting product to positive emotional experience for the kids.  Sure – I can go to Amazon and probably find an awesome costume for both of them, and they may love it.   But I want to invest them in the creation process so they take a  sense of ownership that lasts, and see if that helps them keep the costume from being prematurely discarded or ruined.

Tactics: We broke apart a few boxes and retaped them to create the body, carving holes for arms to slide through and cutting off smaller pieces to use as wings.  Then we cut a sharp-toothed mouth into a postal box, that become the head.  Duct tape was used to cover unsightly text, seams, or blemishes on the body.  A lot of glue was dripped onto the head and it was covered with streamer fragments – this was the part that the kids love the most.

The outcome of about 2 hours of work looks like this:

    We have a long way to go – but their sense of pride in just about 2 hours of work total is pretty impressive.  And the costume is seeing some pretty serious usage.

Now to move past the prototype…

Africa:

Insomniac:

Imagine:

The show was a benefit for GirlsRockVermont. Thanks to the Radio Bean for hosting a great show!

After some research online and speaking to our local music store in Burlington, Advance Music, I found the mic in question – a Rode NT-4. With a gig coming up and us wanting to lock down our sound, it was important for us to get one of these, ideally to play with before we committed to owning it.

I went online and was able to find the mic at MusiciansFriend.com for the same price as Advance quoted me, with free delivery included. But before I just pulled the trigger I called Advance back to see if they could get one faster.  The value of having a local retailer who is involved with the purchase was a big part of my thinking here – knowing someone locally is asking the questions to help you think through the buying process…making sure you’re considering things you may have missed.

On the call with the music shop we talked up to the point of me getting the purchasing person on the phone, and before we got too far he mentioned that they had a used NT-4 in stock, and they would let me borrow it for a week to see how it performed, before committing to making the purchase.  It also means I’ll have someone to call locally, who I actually have met, when/if anything does go wrong.  For context, the mic costs about $530 new, which is no small amount for a semi-pro a cappella group.

So I’m going to swing by Advance over lunch and grab the mic, and we’ll try it out this week.  But it’s a great example of how a phone call can save you a bunch of money, and a relationship with a local retailer can pay off in the short term.

Our group of Extroverts outwardly focused on the basics of any good meeting – visibility in the form of a published agenda, ending on time, everyone getting time to speak, no phones/laptops, good faciliation, and specific action items.  As people took turns speaking through their ideal conditions, there were a number of items that were not explicitly said but came out as subtext or were actualized by the group members themselves. I captured those as well: humor, presence, validation, respect, energy.  As our group’s scribe, I was the reporter when it came time to report our findings.  At that point I explained to Sean Collins (same facilitator as Week 1) and my group that I had captured the words that were spoken by the group in describing their ideal meeting, and that I had also written some of the larger themes that I had *detected* during the discussion.  This generated some laughter, with the “N” in my type coming out, apparently.  As an “N”, or an Intuitive Type, it is definitely in my personality to keep a log of unsaid values during the brainstorm, logging them for future use.

We segmented ourselves again by our second type letters, into “EN” and “ES” next, and discussed how we would want to learn a new job.  This exercise showed the contrast to the “IN” and “IS” groups across the room – where the approaches were markedly different.  The EN types were all about jumping in, possibly with some bit of demonstration, but basically willing to figure it out on the experiential level.  Having ‘context’ was important – knowing where we stood in the organization, the values and principles by which we should operate, and the system by which we would be evaluated.  The essense of “Why” outweighed the “How” for us.  What struck me was how ‘IN’ types listed many of the same ideas – knowing the big picture, where they fit in, understanding the “why”.  Where they diverged from ‘EN’ was the means of gaining this information – they favored a mentoring or document-based learning path.

The “S” groups were all about gathering data and using a structured approach. The “ES” group wanted to iterate through the job, gathering data and incrementally improving their work as they went.  The IS types wanted to begin with manuals and due diligence, perhaps performing an audit of the procedures for the job they were going to learn.
It started to become clear on where Sean was taking us.  I  remembered back to when I first started at Reading Plus – and how I wanted to begin with a comprehensive view of the technology infrastructure.  My first project for the then-sysadmin was a series of questionnaires, in essence a Due Diligence.  It was painful to gather and categorize all that information, but it paid off immensely in the months that followed.  And it hit me, listening to the IS group talk about how they would go about diligently gathering all the information about their new job: I could have really used someone who would  *relish* working that way.  This was all about having different types on the team, and leveraging their strengths when possible.

We continued the exercise in one more configuration, the first 3 letters, to discuss the final question: What is your major contribution to this team?  By then I had already begun to think of the high-performing teams I have been a part of over my career, and how those groups fit together in ways that made the most of everyone’s temperaments even as they fit each other’s skillsets.  Two teams in particular stand out, both because the team members’ skills and personalities were diverse, and the accomplishments of each team exceeded what I would consider the “what’s possible on paper” factor.

It turned out that we didn’t need a UI Developer as we had originally anticipated, so I never posted the job description.  I’m going to send it to her but wanted to post it here to see what people think.  Let me know how this lands.

—

Stop Building Websites that Sell Widgets.  Change the World.  Seriously.

Your workplace…
Reading Plus®/Taylor Associates is the leading producer of silent reading assessments and remediation solutions.
We offer unique, patented products, technology, and implementation strategies that build the foundation for academic, vocational, and real-world success.
We are dedicated to producing research-based products that help students of all ages become better silent readers and independent learners.

Your teammates…
We are a passionate group of technologists that work to support the students who use Reading Plus, the teachers who administer it and the Research and Instructional teams who design our products.
We build interfaces that support our core pedagogical intent while gathering metrics to inform design decisions.

Your days…
Daily stand-ups to sync with the rest of the Team.
Working with the Product Group to understand goals and requirements from User Stories.
Using JIRA to organize your workload.
Writing Code.
Working with other developers to make design and engineering decisions.
Writing Unit Tests.
Collaborating in front of a whiteboard.
Checking code into SVN, triggering builds on the Continuous Integration Server and watching your tests pass with flying colors.
Refactoring your code.
Stepping back to plan the next set of interfaces with the big picture in mind.
Writing more code.

Your skills…
* Strong coding of JavaScript, JSON, HTML, CSS
* Cross-browser / cross-platform interface development experience
* Ability to communicate with technical and non-technical teammates
* Strategies for debugging
* Familiarity with JQuery or other JS frameworks

Your education and work experience…
You have a CS degree and at least three years Web development experience, or five or more years producing code and interfaces.  Most of your work has been developing Ajax-driven applications and sites.  You know your way around tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.  You understand HCI, and love designing meaningful interfaces that streamline interactions for users.  You know enough about IA, IxD and UX to be able to apply them to your daily work.  Agile development is something you have done before. If we say ‘beep’, you think ‘Responsive Web Design’.

Is that you?  Send your CV, LinkedIn profile, or a link to your portfolio to careers@readingplus.com, and put “UI Developer” in the subject.

—

Would be interesting to compare this with a more standard approach.  Or maybe this isn’t that much of a departure after all…

It was a nice mix of people – a lot of managers from northern Vermont companies, with some companies  like Dealer.com and the Vermont Credit Union sending a bunch of their people, and smaller firms sending 1 or 2.  Today’s seminar was led by Sean Collins, Ph.D., who is currently working in organizational development for Dealer.com.

There were a lot of great things to takeaway, some of which I’ll share here.

I enjoyed Sean’s facilitation style. He was intentional about setting ground rules that everyone could live with and establishing a structured presentation style that made fairly clear how he intended to proceed with the class.  He did a nice ice-breaker early in the session, asking participants to tell something about themselves that no one would guess about them, without knowing them really well.

We covered our company, group/team, and personal dynamics first, discussing how Dyadic systems (pairs of people) in the workplace frequently occur, and how that can be a force for good or bad, depending on the specifics.  Not everyone in a dyad knows they are in one, or perceived to be in one, and not all dyad arrangements are peaceful.  These and other structures form the basis for reinforcing behaviors that we will want to emphasize and celebrate when they produce great work.  When they get in the way, sometimes just a nudge to the parties can make visible what is causing the conflict.

There was a great discussion on Situational Leadership.  The types of issues that managers face with the different staff maturity levels of their teams requires flexibility – there is no single perfect style. By understanding the level of commitment and competence of the team, you can support and direct to the degree that is needed.

Next the topic moved to Emotional Intelligence.  I had recently read this article by Daniel Goleman, and so was well prepared for this discussion. EQ is about motivating oneself, persisting in the face of frustration, controlling impulses, delaying gratification, regulating mood without letting people hijack it, and providing empathy and hope to others.

Lastly we covered the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and they presented us with our results from the tests we took online earlier in the week. I was a little bit surprised by my result – I’ve shifted a little since the last time I took this test in 2005.

I left with some insights on how to approach the week until the next class. Going to look at some of the organizational structure of our shop and my team this week, to see how I can leverage my own personality structure in a positive way.  Stay tuned.

For a while now I’ve wanted to move my blog to take over the site, while I redesign it.  Doing so broke WordPress for a while, and I’m just now getting things running smoothly again.  Whew.

Ask a good question to which there is no easy answer.

That’s me, 3rd from the right. With my mouth closed.

Did I mention I sing?  But not with my mouth closed…

This must be Hodja, since Guin’s out front and we’re all snapping fingers.

Full set list from the show (soloist):

Hodja (Guin)
Come and Go with Me (Brian)
Faith (Rich and Guin)
Insomniac (Rick & Chris)
Crazy Little Thing Called Love (Brian)
Africa (Rick)
Imagine (Brian)
When Doves Cry  (Guin)
Child’s Dream / Mother’s Prayer (Suzanne, Guin & Colleen)
Me & Julio (Rick)

Thanks to everyone who came and supported us, it was a fantastic day!