Within the context of a company, a job title has little or no value. Traditionally, job titles separated management and line workers. This is, fundamentally, a relic of the Spartan military that has influenced most of Western organizations for well over 2500 years. Certainly large companies still need this division to some extent, but titles become less important as teams become more cross-functional and roles become less siloed (which I hope is happening after the last 30-years of learning in management). Within small companies, titles rarely represent the roles being fulfilled by individuals. Therefore, internal to the company job titles are fairly ineffective communication devices.

Communication outside of the company can be broken into to sub-categories. First, there is communication by individuals representing the company. A job title is supposed to infer some information about how much power the individual holds. For instance, talking to a Director, VP or C-level person is more likely to result in decisions than a Supervisor or Manager. Of course, this isn’t really true any longer. How many salespeople go by titles of “Account Director,” “Business Consultant,” or “Senior Relations Director?” These are not Directors or Consultants. Sales is important, but this common tactic is a weak attempt to deceive potential clients into assuming they are more important. It feels good when a “Director” took time to call you personally… never mind there are 40 “Directors” making cold calls on that floor. The result is a complete dilution of the supposed value of job titles, which means no valuable information can be reliably inferred from any job title.

Lastly, there is external communication when attempting to fill a position. The job title is usually the first thing a potential applicant will see. This is primarily what job hunters are searching by and looking for. By using these amped up and inappropriate titles, the value of the job title is lost again. While looking looking at postings for “Experience Designers,” I have found job descriptions for front-end developers, third-teir help desk, project managers, records managers, etc. I thought “Experience Designer” was both specific and fairly well defined. Apparently I was wrong. This is occasionally caused by HR processes that don’t have people familiar with the job describe the job. Nobody in HR will ever accurately describe the requirements of an engineer (and nobody has “25 years of experience in VB). These false job titles are also encouraged by management fat, poor hiring practices (which lead to distrustful environments), plain old hubris, and archaic salary bands tied to titles. In short, the potential value of a job title in job postings is seriously hampered.

So, job titles are supposed convey information about the power, responsibility and role of the individual or position. However, thanks to deceptive practices (and yes, I’m looking at you sales and HR), job titles are confused at best and typically convey no consistent information. So, what’s in a name? In this case, absolutely nothing.

Job titles should be more flexible and represent a snapshot of the person’s role. Job titles are, as I think I’ve described, confused. So, rather than attempting to fix job titles to be descriptive, I suggest companies abandon the current assumption that job titles need to be descriptive both internally and externally. The external communication is a lost cause, but internal information is still possible. Simply use clever role descriptions. In fact, I think companies should use the job title as part of the indoctrination process. After an individual performs on a team for so long, or reaches some initial milestone goal, a title is bestowed by the team. A sort of “coming of age” concept to reinforce participation, acceptence, contribution and accountability. For instance, somebody coming onto the team to perform the role of an “Interaction Designer” might be given the title “Design Samurai” after completing a full design cycle with the team.  ”Code Ninjas” could attain different belts as they improve their skills and contributions to the team.  This, if done properly, can improve the espirit de corps of the group.  This also separates, to some extent, the title from the specifics of the position (management vs. line worker, senior vs. junior, etc.) facilitating better communication up and down the chain of command. Lastly, the inventive titles will force external parties to actually question the role rather than making poor assumptions about the position, ultimately leading to better communication (although it might annoy some Baby Boomers).

I know Google and a few select Silicon Valley companies have, to some extent, adopted this philosophy. I’d like to see more companies take it forward and reinvent the way we process job titles in a world where one person might fulfill several roles within a cross-functional / matrix team.

Theater 11 or theater 12?

Here’s a great example. I was walking into a theater about a week ago and saw this brilliant signage.

At first glance I couldn’t believe I was reading that correctly. In the space of two or three minutes, there were several comments made by people walking into the theater. Ok, I’m not counting the people I was with, because they are big geeks like me and notice these things.

I glanced at a couple theaters on the way out and the numbers are supposed to be read down, which makes the signage much more useful. All they have to do is put a vertical line between the numbers to help the eye differentiate between them.  In the case of theater 11 and theater 12, the numbers read correctly top-down or left-right. Perhaps an edge case, but pretty important for at least several hundred patrons every day.

Despite my focus on software usability, we a bombarded with bad design everyday. Wouldn’t it be great if people spent just a little more time thinking things through the rest of us could get through the day with a little less frustration? Nobody is perfect, but how many people signed off on this? The architect, the contractor, the person applying the signs, the investor(s), the manager(s), the rest of the staff, etc. etc. etc. Remember, if one person complains about something, there are probably 50 others that noticed it and just didn’t say anything.

What bad designs have you been victim to today?

Today reminds me of Brazil.  I realize most people have never heard of this movie.  It’s a surreal dystopian view of the future from the mind of Terry Gilliam.  One of my favorite movies, it takes a bureaucratic approach to 1984… on acid.  In fact, the entire movie follows the mishaps based on a single character error on a single form.  A suspected terrorist Tuttle becomes a poor Buttle.  Buttle plays by the rules and is still incarcerated, convicted and executed because of this mistake, which the machinery of society quickly sweeps under the rug.  After all, the Ministry of Information doesn’t make mistakes.

I’ve spent the last several days working through some interesting problems for a client.  The application in question is focused on organization charts, so I’ve reviewed several larger organization charts as part of my research.  Let’s just say, it doesn’t inspire confidence in corporate America.

Can anybody answer my simple question – why don’t planes fall from the sky?

Omaha.com is one of the few sites that consistently degrades the experience with each “upgrade”

Let’s just ignore the poor content for a moment and focus on the design (text included, but not specific content).  I don’t know who the “designer” was (and I’m using that term loosely here), but I do know that he needs to look for a different line of work (or at least learn how to do his chosen line of work a bit).

For the sake of convention in this post, I’m going to call our designer friend Tim the Designer or Tim for short (if, by some strange coincidence, the designer’s name actually is Tim, I apologize; if the designer happens to be a woman, I apologize… to women everywhere for such a poor representation of work).

Header

This might be the worst header I’ve seen since 1997.  It is way to thick.  There are about 170px of wasted space (light blue with gratuitous ads) before we get to the real header.  I understand Tim the Designer (or more accurately, his boss the Paper) needs to have ads displayed to support the Paper… after all, with the Paper’s lack of quality control I wouldn’t expect people to actually pay for it.  However, it’s important to temper those ads with some reasonableness.  Cracked has better ad placement, and they aren’t exactly the typical aspiration of “legitimate” news sites.

Examining the header of Omaha.com

I’m not sure why the navigation is so small on an overly thick gray bevel.  I  don’t know why Tim the Designer chose a serif font for the navigation either.  At this size and weight serifs make letters look smudged and difficult to read.  Why do  designers like Tim insist on making important navigation all CAPS?  Don’t they realize people read by recognizing word shapes?  The high and low points within a word help define those shapes and make it easier to read.  This is typography 101 stuff, Tim (do you think Tim knows a big word like typography?).  Maybe I’ll send a copy of Helvetica to Tim.  It might help get him on the right track (different line of work?).

Where are the tabs?  It looks like Tim tried to create a tab metaphor, but then forgot to actually include the tabs.  This leaves us users oblivious to our current location within the site.  No big deal when we’re on the homepage like the above example, but it is pretty confusing once we dive into a section or article.

This is a site supposedly interested in content, yet I have to look for the search mechanism.  There was a great survey done just a few months ago about search location patterns.  Thanks Tim, you’ve completely destroyed that UI pattern we’ve all grown accustomed to.  Why?  Does Tim bother to ask questions like, “why?”

Secondary navigation

But why stop there?  Tim certainly didn’t.  We’ve also been given secondary navigation that drops out of the primary navigation on roll-over.  Tim, there’s a nifty concept in UXD (or HCI or whatever you want to call it) called discover-ability.  Those primary navigation links don’t even really look like links; they certainly don’t look like additional options are available.  On top of poor discover-ability, those navigation links have elusively small target areas (putting your cursor above the text won’t activate the link or secondary navigation, but below the text will).  Just in case we were wondering what we just moused over, Tim has included large duplicate copy of what we just moused over.  I especially like how mousing over the correct area of primary navigation tells me what section (metro/region in this case) my current article belongs in *dripping with venomous sarcasm*.  Thanks for helping, Tim.  Why does this site make me feel as though I’m being treated like a tw0-year-old?

More secondary navigation?

Left navigation bar

So Tim created second form of secondary navigation… sorta.  The really bright blue thing along the left side (that breaks into the main navigation bar implying a strong relationship) is one form of secondary navigation.  Well, it’s more of a weak attempt to create quick connections to areas of interest.  A very weak attempt.  As we dive into articles and actually attempt to find content (gods forbid anybody wants content from a news site), the role and importance of that blue bar becomes increasingly strained.  In fact,  this makes it apparent Tim the Designer started with the homepage rather than the content page.  Apparently, Tim doesn’t think much of promoting content on the Paper’s news site (I realize the Paper is probably equally guilty of this poor product vision, but Tim’s job is to help keep the Paper on track… clearly, we can’t count on news papers to know anything about new  fads like the Internet).

I especially like how the links separated by bars (e.g., Today | Activities, etc.) only have a single space of separation.  That makes it easy to read and click to navigate the  small links (at least I think they’re links… they don’t look any different than the text, so I can’t be certain!).  Some of the links become slightly brighter when you mouse-over them (and I do mean slightly).  Some actually bother to add an underlying, which at least makes those links easy to identify.  In fact, there are at least five or six different ways links are treated throughout the page.

The calendar is bloody confusing.  It’s the 15th, but it shows me the rest of the week (so we can presumably see the future).  When I click on the 19th, I get a list of events for the 19th.  Okay, I can see a use-case for this one (congratulations Tim).  Unfortunately, despite being on a page all about the upcoming events on the 19th, my calendar still has the 15th subtly highlighted.  The calendar only shows me a week into the future, so I must not think much of yesterday’s news.  Sorry Tim, looks like you’ve failed again.

I’ll have another installment to continue describing how badly Omaha.com and Tim the Designer have failed.

"Severally" search on Twitter

Severally: One at a time; apart from others

Severely: Strict in judgment, discipline, or government; strongly critical or condemnatory

I understand that severally is a word usually limited to the lawyers (or liars as my law prof, Ken Berke, used to say), but doesn’t this still seem a bit egregious?

I searched Twitter and a few other sites to find good examples of severally used correctly.  With the exception of texts written by professionals, I haven’t found many.  I went back more than a week and every instance of severally should have been severely, which is even slightly shorter!  One would assume people Twitting about should pay close attention to wasted characters.

Or how about something a bit simpler.  Something that I would expect the average third-grader to understand (but suspect wouldn’t nonetheless).

Guest: one who is a recipient of hospitality at the home or table of another

Guess: to predict (a result or an event) without sufficient information

The funny part is guess should be easier to type.  So, either people typically mispronounce these words, don’t know how to type or had really bad English teachers.  Now, it’s most likely a combination of all of those things, but I don’t think I’m asking too much here.

Insure: to provide or arrange insurance for

Ensure: to make sure or certain

Perhaps a subtle difference, but this one annoys me for some reason.  Some dictionaries have added a third or fourth definition to insure that mirrors ensure.  Perhaps I’ve spent a few too many years reading finance and economics books; however, these two words seem very distinctly different to me.  I believe Frank Knight’s definitions of risk and uncertainty probably influenced me here.  Knight defined risk as anything one could calculate and purchase insurance against.  Uncertainty, however, cannot be calculated or insured.  An entrepreneur accepts uncertainty (and is rewarded for it when successful) while purchasing insurance to cover risks.  The entrepreneur has the difficult task of ensuring his investors the project has a good likelihood of success.  It might be anal, but there is an important difference when you attempt to be specific.

They’re: contraction for “they are” (note how it includes both pronoun and verb, so it’s built in an action.. like it’s)

There: at or in that place

Their: used as a modifier before a noun

Okay, these three are a bit of a pet peeve of mine.  Even if you’re typing a quick message on a Blackberry or iPhone, you should be able to take the time to differentiate between a noun + verb, noun and modifier.  These are completely different words!

The list goes on and on.  I could probably write a short novel describing the pains of passive tense alone (thanks Ken).  As Vampire Weekend put it, who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?  I’d just like people to think about their content contributions a little bit more than seem to.*  Semantics might be a dull subject, but it is necessary to effectively communicate… and what’s the point of creating content if it doesn’t communicate?  A strong understanding of the nuances of language improve your ability to communicate and succeed in life.

Ultimately, I’m lazy.  I use big words occasionally, because they articulate my thoughts more accurately, and that means I can use fewer words.  In other words, sesquipedalian people improve efficacy and efficiency by developing concise communication.

That being said, always speak to the level of your audience (after all, communication requires comprehension to be valuable).  Don’t go around using words like sesquipedalian, unless you’re confident your audience either a) knows what it means, b) would like to learn a new word or c) is holding a dictionary.  Otherwise, stick to your audience and focus the communication.  I might get a bit long winded, but I try to be precise (one of the bad habits I picked up tying to communicate with lawyers and engineers).

* Yes, you can end a sentence with a preposition in English.  Your second-grade teacher didn’t know what she was talking about.  The rule, as I understand it, comes from Latin; however, English has a Germanic root, not Romantic.  If you don’t believe me, consider which of these sounds more natural.

• Who are you going out with?
• With whom are you going out?