Random tidbits

[Amy]

On page 37 (of my version), "freshman" was mentioned. Here we are actively moving away from using that label in favor of "1st year students", to de-gender the term. As an aside, I'm also trying to say "snow people", which is just not easy. :P

Page 40 mentioned long names being problematic. Short names are, too! Minimum character count causes problems when supporting people with Korean and nearby Asian country heritage. One system I worked with required at least 3 characters, and that just wasn't possible with some names.

Page 46 brought up some thoughts about personas, and it energized a project I have only worked on marginally but have most of the content. I'm super excited about it, but I have gotten hung up on all of the little details that this shift would alleviate. Now I just have to get through some projects so I can get back to it (happy to talk about it offline if anyone is interested).

(Been sick, so still have over half the book to read.)

[Amy]

Some quotes I really enjoyed:

"Real friends don't create metrics to gauge whether people think they care. They don't try to tell you jokes when you're in the middle of a crisis. They don't force you to relive trauma, or write off hate speech, or any of the things tech products routinely do in the name of engagement." - p. 98
(Sadly, I've tried to say funny things to someone going through painful experience. Feel a lot of regret about that one.)

"In a 2014 report for scientific American, Columbia professor Katherine W. Phillips examined a broad cross section of research related to diversity and organizational performance. And over and over, she found that the simple act of interacting in a diverse group improves performance, because it 'forces group members to prepare better, to anticipate alternative viewpoints and to expect that reaching consensus will take effort.'" - p. 184
(I think it's more complicated than that, but I like the direction this research is going. One also needs to have good tools in place for acting on decisions, for instance.)

"When we work only with those similar to us, we often 'think we all hold the same information and share the same perspective... This perspective, which stopped the all-white groups from effectively processing the information, is what hinders creativity and innovation." - p.185
(Again, I like the inference of this research, but I want more ammunition, more research that directly correlates homogeneity to creativity, and creativity/innovation improvements that will make the industry listen.)

[Eric]

Really interesting about character counts Amy. We were working on some policy at Mid-Hudson Library System and I was working off the assumption that we need data for first and last names. The librarian from Woodstock insisted that she had someone named only Sunshine.

That was a sort of humorous example but there are clearly examples when going off this assumption was pretty stupid and insensitive.

[Amy]

I'm reading Design for Real Life in the interim (it overlaps quite a bit with Technically Wrong, which isn't surprising), but they've brought up the Native American name debacle at Facebook. It reminded me again of when I was married and took my husband's name but wanted my high school classmates to find me by my maiden name so changed it to First "Maiden" Last and was flagged, having to defend my name.

Thinking back, it was SUPER obvious it was a "boys programming club" at that point and they've continued to struggle with the fact that not everyone is a young white male even a decade later.