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Dear Editors,

I write regarding a recent article about education reform politics.

There is an entire discipline of professionals who study what works and what doesn’t work in education.  They have done research for decades in every state and all over the world, and they largely agree about what improves student outcomes and what doesn’t. I am talking about education professors, people with PhDs studying schools, teaching, and learning.

In your lengthy article about education reform, and in the larger conversation about these issues, the people who actually know what they’re talking about — education professors — are not consulted or quoted.  Instead it’s just a bunch of donors and politicians with “opinions”.  Can you help us move towards a more fact-based conversation by interviewing the experts the next time you report on education reform (or really any issue)?

Robin

A recent thread on LinkedIn discusses how user experience professionals can answer the question “What do you do for a living?” One contributor wrote:

“I help companies make their products more user friendly.” That’s a term most people understand. If they ask follow up questions I will go into more detail.

The term “user friendly” makes me think of the nineties, as in “Mac is more user friendly than Windows.” I hesitate before using it, because as a software designer, I want to go beyond “friendly” and make interfaces that are also more powerful, more fun, more educational.

But I too have found that “user friendly” is the term that normal (non-UX) people understand. We naturally anthropomorphize computers, and want to know whether they are friendly, like a person we would choose to spend time with.

Designers create this “user experience” via methods such as “human-centered design”, “user research”, “advocating” and “interaction design”… but these are all technical terms that don’t mean much to people outside the field.

What people really want to know is whether the end product will feel like a friend.

John Gruber has written an important critique of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography. To me, the following is the most interesting core of the argument:

Prior to Jobs’s return to Apple, design was what happened at the end of the engineering process. Post-Jobs, engineering became a component of the design process. This shift made all the difference in the world.

Isaacson does not understand this.

My impression is that most technologists, journalists, analysts, and certainly the general public do not understand this either. But it is fundamental, and it is indeed the core of what I have always been most interested in doing: using engineering to solve design goals.

It’s strange that this is a point of confusion, because engineers have always been tasked with creating products that are useful for humans. Perhaps the problem is that as engineering became more complex over time, engineers increasingly focused on their subfields, analyzing the quantitative properties of materials and semiconductors, and were no longer trained in what used to be called “ergonomics.” User-centered design is really just a return to the original intention of engineering — to create technology for humans. It is a reminder that the human side of the equation is just as important as the scientific side, and that these two are intimately connected.

Gruber points out a 5-word Steve Jobs quote that Isaacson should have paid better attention to:

Design is how it works.

In Gruber’s words: “engineering should and can be part of the art of design.”

From the Gates Foundation 2012 Annual Letter:

I still find it hard to believe that 95 percent of teachers are not given specific feedback about how to improve. Even more important than a pay schedule that rewards excellence is identifying and understanding excellence so that teachers know how they can improve. In all the meetings I have had with teachers around the country, and in the surveys we have done, it is clear that most teachers want more feedback and will use it to improve, even if the financial rewards for performance are comparatively modest.

Horace Dediu makes an important argument that Apple’s stock price has been based simply on the value of its latest products, whereas “the process of product development at Apple is worth nothing.”

In other words, from the market’s perspective:

Innovations are valuable, but there is no such thing as an innovation process. If there was such a thing, then we could measure it and put a number on its value. Until then, innovation is nothing more than a spin of the roulette wheel.

Dediu’s unspoken point, of course, is that the market is missing something huge: Apple has honed and demonstrated its ability to repeatedly design, produce, and sell innovative consumer electronics products. I am absolutely convinced that their success is not due to luck but rather to a finely tuned innovation process. That doesn’t mean they will never release duds, of course, but it means that on the whole they can be counted on to continue to disrupt markets with innovative products. The wider technology community misunderstands this ability so deeply that instead of trying to copy Apple’s innovation process, they insist that it is nothing but good luck and good marketing.

The University of Washington has about 30,000 undergraduates, about 500 of which were enrolled in introductory classes in the statistics department. Assuming that number holds every quarter, 1500/30000 = 1.6% of UW students take an intro statistics class each year.

There are 18 million college students in the United States. If the overall percentage who take statistics is the same as at UW, then about 300,000 college students take intro stats each year in this country.

Bret Victor released a really excellent article about what is missing in the user interfaces of current technology, and what we should consider when crafting visions for the future. Compelling and easy to understand.

I call [iPad] technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade….

We live in a three-dimensional world. Our hands are designed for moving and rotating objects in three dimensions, for picking up objects and placing them over, under, beside, and inside each other….

To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It’s obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.

Read the whole article, which has great pictures as well.

“There is no such thing as a viable democracy made up of experts, zealots, politicians, and spectators.”

-Liz Coleman, president of Bennington College [TED talk]

In high school, I made a website on ancient Roman architecture as a class project in world history. That was over ten years ago. A few days ago I got an email:

I recently came across your resource website at http://www.robinstewart.com/personal/learn/romarch/links.htm and I found it to be extremely helpful in some personal academic research I’m doing — I just wanted to say thank you.  As a student and an educator, it is a rare treat to come across such thoughtful and concise online resources like this, especially the older ones. In my humble opinion, this is one of the timeless treasures of the Internet.

I forwarded that along to the teacher of the history class, with the subject line “History project website still useful more than ten years later…” His response:

Hi Robin.  Wow.  That is really kind of awesome.  I wouldn’t have bet money that the site was still on-line. Bravo all over again.

I guess this is why I keep things around on my website.

From the trenches of science, it’s easy to label evolution deniers and global warming skeptics as dumb or at least uninformed. But we should remember that the scientific method is not an intuitive process, and takes a lot of time to learn.

For one thing, the scientific method is based on probabilities, which humans famously misunderstand. We play the lottery because we have a chance of winning, even though that chance is vanishingly small. We tend to think of very large or small probabilities as less extreme than they actually are, so when scientists say there is a 95% chance (or even a 99.9% chance) that, say, smoking causes cancer, it is easy for us to simply hear “they’re not sure.” Intuitive science is based on stories and anecdotes, rather than quantifiable statistics. We might pray and then find out that our friend returned to health. So there’s “a good chance” that the one caused the other. Isn’t that the same as scientists saying “there’s a good chance” that antibiotics were the cause of her recovery?

For another thing, it’s not immediately obvious that we need controls and placebos. If we want to find out whether an intervention works, why would we do an experiment that doesn’t actually use the intervention? Worse, isn’t it morally wrong in many cases to not give the intervention? In order to prove that an educational or healthcare strategy is effective, we have to not use the strategy in some classrooms and hospitals. Scientists are monsters!

These are just the first few tricky aspects of science that come to mind. As I re-read the Intro Stats textbook, I’m reminded how subtle a lot of this is, and how even professional scientists can sometimes get it wrong. That doesn’t mean we should be skeptical of science as a whole, though science itself relies on a healthy skepticism of individual results (another subtle distinction!). It does mean that scientists and journalists should try to explain the scientific process, over and over, day after day, when presenting results to the public. Because if you’re not doing science every day, it’s easy to forget how it works.

I hope to do what I can to help everyone do more science every day.