Don’t Box the Blog with the Software
At a client meeting this week I ran into one of those magic Kodak moments where you can see the person you’re talking to unable to make a quantum leap into the world you’re explaining - that face is worth a photo. Not due to technical jargon in the discussion but because people wrap up objects in their worldview in overly simple boxes. We do it to protect ourselves from having to deal with the complexity of the world around us. A programming term for this is abstraction - we only create interfaces that people deal with so they can’t touch the icky bits or break them by mistake. Your car is an abstraction for a whole pile of technology run by an internal combustion engine and about 40 computers.
So back to the story. This mental model was interesting from a client perspective because it involved blogs. You have to understand that we were going to use blogging software to create a low level content management system that would then be hooked into some server side processing of an online assessment. The client enters articles, tags them appropriately, and then these are used contextually at the other end of the assessment process. If that makes any sense. So, basically, they have an information section and we’re using blogging software to get a whole bunch of stuff for free.
And back to our clients mental model. One mockup used the term Information on the global navigation while another, quickly sketched on the bus to the meeting, used the term Blog. They are in many ways exactly the same thing but for some reason the client had enough time to put information into the system but not enough to enter blog content - the exact same content. Seriously. In a show / hide experience I watched an instant smile / frown response similar to showing a small child the lollies behind my back. And this was because to my client the software and her perception of blogging were synonymous. WordPress, for example, and blogging are the same thing boxed into the one mental model.
This is interesting from not only in the worldview of the client but also of any website user. Mental models they bring with them to a web interface affect how they interact and perceive affordances.
After coming back to this about five or six times with the client it became apparent that she still couldn’t separate the two concepts. And how could she? Seriously? Because when you think of it I was asking her to believe she was wrong about the world, a much greater challenge than to insist she just enter some information. One was a mountain and the other was achievable. Show / hide.
I’m not really sure how someone can have half an hour to type in a piece of information but no time to type in a blog but that’s my worldview. A divide by zero problem. Ultimately, what we use a piece of software for might be outside the accepted paradigm of writing to tell friends what we did on the holidays. To us its just a piece of software and not a black box.
April 27th, 2008 at 12:37 am
Ah, insightful article mate - and so true of many situations we encounter while doing any sort of web or IT work.
April 27th, 2008 at 9:10 am
Yes this is common bridge, people bring a lot expectations to projects and assumptions.
BTW by the sound of the project you might find life easier and faster if you use http://www.silverstripe.com/
April 27th, 2008 at 9:55 am
Matt, the series of tubes seems to be more understandable than an interconnected network of distributed computers lol… go figure
Robin, yes SilverStripe looks interesting. Unfortunately this was a uni project and the crux of the meeting was the client doesn’t want to give us actual content just base the whole site on linking to PDFs… no content = no site. So we’ve had to bypass the client and move into dev mode already, plus we had to identify which software a month ago, so we can’t try SilverStripe on this one. While it will be up for assessment its going to be ripped down straight afterwards so we’re ripping (and referencing) content and some images for assessment purposes only now. If it was still a live client I probably would have reconsidered blogging it nowdays.
Currently I’m working as a copy writer / graphic designer for a multinational maritime and logistics company based in Dubai. I’m working for their Corporate Academy producing their monthly eNewsletter and doing graphic design elements for some training modules. It should expand from that role over time. That’s been interesting, corporate stuff. I’ve knocked back web development work recently as I need a bit of a rest from it I think. Broadening out the resume. The pay is good and there are enough hours to use it to jump back into business, its also ongoing and long term as far as I am aware. My strength has always been as a writer rather than a techie, from my perspective.