Tweet

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

More from @mulegirl

Erika Hall

@mulegirl

4 Nov

Everyone hyped on surveys or polling should actually read Rensis Likert's PhD dissertation in which he describes the method we've reduced to "the Likert scale".

Here, I googled it for you:
legacy.voteview.com/pdf/Likert_193…

Oh, I should add content warning: racism.

Not his so much as the attitudes he is studying—although he does use the 1932 vernacular.

I shudder to think of giving the same survey in today's America.

Read 6 tweets

Erika Hall

@mulegirl

21 Oct

If I could change ONE thing about how everyone doing "creative problem solving" worked, it would be to stop brainstorming ideas and start brainstorming questions.

Brainstorming and ranking ideas is the worst and it puts team members in competition with each other to look smart.

But if you get everyone in a room (virtual or otherwise) and say "OK, what are all the things we're assuming or simply lack information about?" and then "Which of these areas of ignorance are highest priority?" that is both immensely useful and enhances collaboration.

But the idea that "ideation" is a good and productive use of people's time is so baked into how people think about design and business.

Because it's easy and fun and everyone secretly wants to "win" at group ideation.

Read 5 tweets

Erika Hall

@mulegirl

23 May

Marine biology fun fact of the day:

Moray eels have pharyngeal jaws, much like the Alien xenomorph.

"Moray eels are the only known animals that use pharyngeal jaws to actively capture and restrain prey in this way"

Additional moray eel fun facts:

Groupers swim up to moray eels and shake their heads to say "Hey pal, let's go hunting!"

nationalgeographic.com/science/phenom…

Here is an x-ray of a moray eel that will in no way give you nightmares. You can make out the pharyngeal jaws.

Read 4 tweets

Erika Hall

@mulegirl

14 May

The missing role at most organizations is a communication/collaboration facilitator—a person to help create intentionally humane and effective communication protocols.

So much of work is communication in many modes and channels. And it's really really hard to get right.

IT picks software tools. Facilities runs meeting rooms (in the before).

No one thinks about how to orchestrate the most functional communication among various roles/tasks/etc. People just treat it like something that everyone knows how to do well.

Creating the conditions for healthy communication among people *is* interaction design.

Just having physical meeting rooms, or slack channels or zoom is like giving the end user a command prompt.

That's a bad metaphor because the command line is less taxing than zoom.

Read 10 tweets

Erika Hall

@mulegirl

29 Feb

I ended up with my subspeciality in design research because the most critical problem in the design of any policy, product, or complex system is that humans have a tough time with critical thinking and evidence-based decision-making.

IMO you can't claim to be doing human-centered design or care about human-computer interaction if you don't take as table stakes that humans are shitty decision-makers who will ignore evidence in the face of hierarchy and in-group/out-group status concerns.

The most striking sentence in this NPR piece about the doctor who discovered that handwashing prevents the spread of disease:

"Doctors were upset because Semmelweis' hypothesis made it look like they were the ones giving childbed fever to the women."

npr.org/sections/healt…

Read 6 tweets

Erika Hall

@mulegirl

23 Feb

Let's talk about being metrics-driven. If you are focused on metrics rather than learning or outcomes, you risk extreme tunnel vision.

I mean for any of us who grew up in the US and went to college, our education and capacity to learn was reduced to GPAs and board scores that determined our fates at a tender age, so it isn't surprising this mindset is appealing to any manager who did well by those numbers.

At the extreme end of managing to a metric, at all costs you get Wells Fargo.

And I think we can agree that's bad, right?

Read 16 tweets

Share this page!

Erika Hall

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @mulegirl

Erika Hall

Erika Hall

Erika Hall

Erika Hall

Erika Hall

Erika Hall

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Like this author's thread?