Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Rahel Anne Bailie

Rahel Anne Bailie — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:22 GMT

It takes a a lot of courage to bare your mistakes, particularly when admission live on forever in a blog post somewhere. Your candor is commendable – we can all learn from this, and use your experience as a resource for some of our own clients who might otherwise hold out for what they think is a cheap-and-easy solution. Here’s to being human!

Rahel Anne Bailie — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 16:12:13 GMT

Talent isn’t *all* you need, but talent *is* definitely part of what you need to be great at design. Just as some will never be great dancers or musicians, some will never be great designers. It’s the talent that gets you to a certain point, and the work ethic that takes you the rest of the way. I’ve supervised my share of designers, and have seen the various mixes of high-talent/low-habits, low-talent/low-habits, and low-talent/high-habits, and high-talent/high-habits. The first two might are the same nightmare in the workplace – missed deadlines, sloppy deliverables, and eventually departmental dissent as coworker resentment rises. Of course, we all want to work with high-talent/high-habit designers, but I’ll take an average-talent/high-habit designer any day, particularly in a junior position where they have the opportunity to bust out and gain confidence.

Rahel Anne Bailie — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 06:23:03 GMT

Using comics to storyboard to explain UX is only a step away from using comics as user guides. (Slight tangent but I haven’t seen this discussed anywhere.)

In the 1990s, when I worked for the provincial Legal Aid agency, we produced “how to” comic books for First Nations communities (equivalent of “Native American” communities) to communicate what to do in common legal situations where people might not qualify for legal aid but may not be able to afford a lawyer. The comic books were very well received, because they were seen as relevant due to their cultural specificity, and the advantage was that we reached a vulnerable audience whose literacy skills may not have allowed them to slog through a traditional booklet on “legal options after spousal abuse” or “legal recourse after removal of your children”.

Like using comics for UX work, comics are an economical and evocative way to explain complex topics at a glance. Putting the amount of information we got into an 8- or 12-page comic was an incredibly effective way of communicating not just the technical info, but also communicating mountains of contextual info that would never have made its way into any other textual or graphic (as in Visio) representation of a process.

Rahel Anne Bailie — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 03:32:03 GMT

In response to Boke’s comment re a “set of smart questions,” a methodology has been developed that does delve deeper and draw out more meaningful and pertinent information. It’s now known as Cognitive Edge, and was pioneered by Dave Snowden (formerly of IBM’s Cynefin Centre, or is that of IBM’s former Cynefin Centre). I was so impressed with the methodology that I got my accreditation this spring.

At any rate, here’s an example of the qualitative difference of data that can be gathered. A survey asks on a scale of 1 to X, say 1 to 7 for purposes of this exercie, about a matter, with the best rating being the higher number. How people interpret the question will affect how they average the rating. For example, “how do you rate the administrative function” could rate 4 if it’s average, or a person could rate it 4 if they kind of like 3 things but detest 1 thing. And the more surveys you gather, the less meaningful the data becomes. However, if you gather anecdotes (the quality of the prompting questions are critical), and then attach have the respondents rank the anecdotes (in effect, using metadata) on a bell curve where answers in the mid-range are acceptable, and the “trouble signal detection” lies in the outer ranges, then it becomes more obvious where the clusters are. First, you gather information about things that may never come up on a survey; second, because the respondents do the ranking, the attribution ranking is accurate; and third, the good/bad dichotomy is replaced by a hypo-state/normal-state/hyper-state paradigm that is more tolerant of what is “normal.”

Rahel Anne Bailie — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:28:09 GMT

We – the artist, the writer, and I – did go through a thumbnail/storyboard process to work out the various aspects of the publication. I glossed over this part in the first paragraph under “How This Book Came About” but can describe it a bit more here. We had a field worker and in-house lawyer describe to the artist and script writer what a typical case and legal process would be. The artist went away and did some rough storyboards, providing some options for drawings. A few of them were just for comic relief (no pun intended) – we knew that they might reflect reality but we wouldn’t be able to use them. The writer wrote the dialogue, but because she was used to writing for television, sometimes she would write in actions which, of course, wouldn’t work in a static medium like paper. So I edited down the script in the first pass, and then worked with the artist to fit the script to his drawings. We calculated the right number of drawings, chose from the ones he’d drawn, added in a few more to be drawn, adjusted the script to fit, and so on, until it all worked.

Then, we had to run the final product by the legal team again to make sure that the fiddling we did hadn’t changed any of the legal context. I don’t think the publication is available online, but I could ask the agency if they could put it online or for permission to put it online. If they don’t want it online, it would be because laws have changed, and they wouldn’t want legal info to be out there that’s past its due date, so to speak.

Rahel Anne Bailie — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:55:48 GMT

One of the then project sponsors of these publications in the Native Services Department contacted me to clarify some points, which I’d like to state here: “As part of of Native Programs for LSS at the time I [Bernee Boulton] would like to point out that it was I, who along with Penny Desjarlais who came up with the initial idea for this project. I invited Candis Callison to the project. It was she who suggested the most talented Brian for the project.” By omission of the details, I did not intend to diminish the most important role of Bernee and Penny in sponsoring and directing these publications, and my memory failed me in remembering who had referred whom for the project. Without Penny, and certainly without Bernee, this project could not have happened, and certainly wouldn’t have been as successful as it was!