User experience should not be a joke, but it is

The difference between the plan in design for pedestrians to use a paved  path and what people do in real -- cut  corners by walking through the grass

 

When I planned to write this post I was just going to feature a joke. But it became slightly more complicated as a result of my search for a written account of it. 

I never expected to find it in Snopes of all things. But what's even funnier than the joke is how the post treats it. 

Some background first:  I've been reading Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, which actually did make me think quite a lot about usability and the kind of planning and testing that has to go into design built for the user experience  (UX). 

Remember the joke about the parrot? 

I then remembered a joke about a man who sends his mother an impressive bird as a gift. She mistakes his intent and cooks it. In the bare bones account, you can see that it's a simple misunderstanding.

But the fuller version highlights the way the giver has a lot more information than the receiver that is not conveyed by the presentation alone. In other words, this is the perfect illustration of the disconnect between the designer and the intended user of the design.

I had recalled this joke as being of Jewish origin, and there are various sites that corroborate that, including stljewishlight and Aish. The latter version is the one that Snopes opens with -- though it deliberately removes the Jewish association of the joke (as the joke is very much a Jewish mother one in observing how difficult she is to please)  by saying the parrot was taught to recite the Bible in a church. 

We'll skip the cultural appropriation one and go to an older version of the joke in which the gift is for a wife rather than a mother. Snopes gives a real credit for that one to Bennett Cerf and the book Laughing Stock. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1945:

A certain lady who lived on Park Avenue loved birds and her husband was rich enough to indulge her every whim. For a birthday present he found her a parrot that spoke eleven languages and that cost him exactly $100 for each language. When he got home, he said, "What d'ya think of that wonderful bird I sent you?

"It was elegant," she answered. "It's in the oven right now."

The husband's face turned purple. "In the oven? he shouted. "Why, that bird could speak eleven languages."

The wife asked, "Then why didn't it say something?"

The joke's on Snopes

I love the punchline here because it demonstrates that it's not the recipient's fault that she didn't grasp the intent of the gift. She sees a bird; she thinks dinner. She does not think novelty pet, and the only way to make her think that way it to make it glaringly obvious that this is not an ordinary bird -- a failure of communication that doesn't account for user expectations.

But that's not how David Mikkelson of Snopes reads it. No, he suggests that the joke is on the ditzy wife or clueless mother, and so he misses the real point of the joke..

Other people are not in your own head, and it is your assumption that they'll know what you know and act accordingly that makes you the fool in the joke.

Tell me that you don't about usability without saying it

In the course of reading Hangry: A Startup Journey by Mike Evans, I came across a perfect illustration of various ways in which people prove they have no clue about usability. In the seventh chapter on p. 112, he recounts the "subtle and dangerous" issues that came to his attention after he gets back from 6 weeks away from the GrubHub office: 

"I hear a software developer frustrated that users on the website can't see the obvious buttons -- as opposed to assuming the button need to be more obvious. I hear an account manager (not Todd) refer to a restauranteur as 'stupid' for not understanding the order confirmation system." 

At that point in his startup journey, Evans had already learned that you need to see things from the customer/audience/user point of view if you are to succeed in business. Their lack of understanding reflects more on your failure to incorporate an empathetic perspective into your design than their lack of intelligence. 

Maybe the visitor just wants a bird for dinner, and you're assuming she will be automatically understand you're offering her a unique pet. Or maybe you're seeing the cut animals from above, but the users view is in the position of the baby from below.

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Discovering Buckminster Fuller on Long Island

While I may have heard of Buckminster (more commonly known as Bucky) Fuller in the distant past, what made me grow curious about him was a visit to a Long Island park named for his friend, the author, Christopher Morley. There are far larger and more impressive parks on Long Island, but the distinction this one has is that Morley's Knothole -- a small house in his yard he would escape to to write in peace and quiet -- has been relocated on the park grounds. 

Failing to find the bathroom in the park

While anyone may build a shed of sorts in which to escape the hubbub at home, they are not likely to have it equipped with a Dymaxion bathroom. But as Morley was a close friend of the man who dreamt up the design, he got on for his Knothole. Curiosity about that drove me to visit the park to see this marvel of easy-cleaning engineering that dates back to 1936. Alas, you cannot see anything inside the Knothole, which is kept closed and is falling into a sad state of disrepair.

What it should have looked like is this:

source https://slideplayer.com/slide/4283236/

The bathroom would have been made out of metal in a very compact and efficient design that was meant to be very easy to clean. Fuller did plan to one day render it in plastic for greater comfort, but the ones he did get made were metal.  The bathroom was supposed to be just one component of the highly efficient Dymaxion house that he was hoping would take off but never did. 

Even Morley's Knothole follows very traditional-looking architecture with nothing that would make you expect it houses a revolutionary design. In contrast, the full Dymaxion home was meant to be modern all around, and I do mean round. See the vintage video that showcases it here: 

Reading Fuller

With my curiosity piqued, I checked out several Bucky Fuller biographies from my library last year. But despite being a pretty fast and determined reader, I couldn't make it through them. But in August, my library got in a new bio, and this one I was able to read within the allotted two weeks for new books. It's Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller. 

If I were to give it a star rating, I'd probably give it 4/5. It's highly readable despite the geometric details entailed in describing Fuller's concepts and their applications that endure beyond his own lifetime (like the carbon formation that resembles a soccer ball that was named Buckminsterfullerene AKA Buckyballs in his honor).

However, I don't fully buy into the parallels that Nevala-Lee attempts to draw with modern day influential figures and Fuller. Not all people who may be described as visionary or innovative operate in the same way. Certainly, Fuller was never was a major commercial success and really did not have good business sense at all. 

This account of Fuller may upset some people. Other descriptions of him focused on his creativity and presented him as a kind of magnanimous leader. But the take on his personality here is much darker. There are several account of fallouts with people who felt they were shortchanged on credit for concepts or who were cut out of Fuller's organization because he refused to cede control.

Worse than that are the glimpses into his more private life that shatter the romantic story of his marriage. He remained married for over 60 years and was not even parted from his wife in death.They shared a funeral and a grave. Yet he cheated on her repeatedly -- sometimes with women young enough to be his daughter or just barely of legal age. It seems he bought into a kind of myth he created of himself and associated these women with muse-like figures, linking them to particular discoveries, as he wrote in a certain account himself. But the marriage itself reflects some of the Long Island connections that the book brought to light.

Fuller and  Long Island History

What struck me in particular is that Fuller was married at Rock Hall, a colonial house that has been a museum since the middle of the 20th century. But in the early part of that century, it was still being
used as a home by the Hewlett family. Fuller's wife, Anne, was a Hewlett, and her wedding took place in that house. The Fullers even lived in Lawrence for some time and attended a church in Far Rockaway.* As someone who grew up in that area and who has visited Rock Hall a few times, I found it striking that such a famous person had such a strong connection to the place is not featured at the museum at all. 

Fire Island lighthouse: photo by Ariella Brown

But there is yet another location on Long Island that is connected to the Fuller name. That is his great-aunt, Margaret Fuller. If you visit the Fire Island Lighthouse  -- or its site -- you can find an account of the shipwreck that proved fatal to her and her young son when she was returning to the United States from abroad 

Nevala-Lee does make much of the Margaret-Bucky connection, as they both had a strong sense of purpose and conviction that they were particularly endowed with abilities to use to guide the world. Bucky even took a nautical image to express that -- not of a lighthouse but of the small end on a ship's rudder that can determine its direction -- the trim tab. In fact that is what he had inscribed on his gravestone pictured below:

    

                                   https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bucky_TRIMTAB.jpg

*One thing the author does get wrong is the name of the hospital in Far Rockaway. He mentions that Anne went to St. Joseph's in Far Rockaway, but the name of the hospital is St. John's. It's still there.

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How many times did Edison fail in attempting to invent the light bulb?