Ada Lovelace Day 2011: Kelly McCarthy

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, and my post this year is about someone I’ve had the privilege to work with: Kelly McCarthy. Kelly is a project manager and an information architect. She co-owns Easy! Designs, a boutique web consultancy based in Chattanooga, Tennessee (which also produces Retreats 4 Geeks, an alternative web technology training series focusing on hands-on learning for web professionals). She also co-founded indie publisher Easy Readers, which just released its first title.

I first met Kelly on a steamboat where the Web Education (Rocks) Summit was taking place in 2009—where Web Standards Project (WaSP) members working on the InterAct Web Standards Curriculum were participating. Despite not recalling any personal conversations vividly, stamped into my memory is a very, very long night of a debate on HTML5, all of us surrounded by emptying beer bottles on the deck, picking apart a complicated topic. I distinctly remember Kelly’s voice being amongst the strongest in the debate.

Since then, I’ve been fortunate to work with Kelly on a couple of WaSP projects—most recently, on the design, development and planning leading up to the launch of Web Standards Sherpa.

Some people might think that a project manager’s role isn’t “technical”. Having had the opportunity to lead a team of project managers when I was a director of a web design studio, I’ve come to realise what differentiates a great project manager (from a good one) is not only the ability to communicate requirements and constraints between the clients and members of the team—great project managers have a solid grasp of technical side of building for the web. On top of being skilled at managing teams, Kelly also steps smoothly into an information architect’s shoes, balancing the creative and the pragmatic while getting things done according to budget and schedule. Kelly’s role is possibly the most difficult on any project, on any team.

It’s such a rare pleasure to work with someone like Kelly who knows how to create just the right environment for everyone on her team to be able to do their job and do it well. She’s amazing and fun to work with!

I know she’s too busy getting things done to talk much about what she does and achieves—she barely gets time to tweet or blog—that’s why Kelly’s my Ada Lovelace Day heroine this year.

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Published:
October 7, 2011 – 12:51 pm
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By steph
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Radio silence

This blog has been silent for a time while I’ve been moving continents and busy getting settled. In the meantime, I’ve started a Tumblr blog called “Everyone Is Other“, where I am collecting material relating to cultural bias and collective psyche relating to prejudice.

Published:
June 4, 2011 – 8:57 am
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By steph
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Guilt-free street fundraising

This photo was taken a couple of weeks before Christmas; I was standing at a bus-stop across the road from this woman who was dressed in vivid colours, dancing and jingling her bucket in time to a boombox blasting boppy Christmas music at an intersection. I was immensely impressed by her success rate. She would score a donation from every second or third car each time the lights turned red.

Contrast this to an experience I had just the week before, where I was walking east on a main street for some 10 blocks to take care of an errand, and ran into —not two, not three—but six “foot soldiers” from the same non-profit organisation seeking donations. They were uniformed, polite, and obviously not having much luck. By the time I was accosted by the sixth foot soldier, I told her she probably really ought to have a word with her supervisor about how to observe the movement of people and spread the team north-south where they would have a higher chance of encountering new people. On this street, everyone walks east-west because it’s a major local shopping street, so spreading the team east-west only meant the whole team would likely encounter the same people, who would in turn get rather tired of them. (I guess no one had ever thought a bit of “end-user” observation would come helpful for fundraising, had they?)

There were probably several factors against them, despite how well presented and genuine they were. For one thing, the weather sucked. Everyone was walking fast to spend as little time outdoors as possible. Secondly, well-intentioned, polite foot soldiers always have this way of making you feel guilty. They would read you the earnest mission of the non-profit they are working for, and try to tell you why you should donate. They always seemed… too pure. And you’re not feeling very pure yourself today. You want to give to them, but you don’t know at this point (out there in the street when your mind is on something else) whether you could spare the cash, especially if they wanted regular donations. And you certainly don’t want to be receiving their campaign newsletters in the mail by surrendering your home or email address—all this, despite the fact that you actually want to give. Out on the street on a bad-weather day just wasn’t the time nor the place.

I tweeted:

a street musician once told me people are more generous on sunny days. if you are a charity, don’t send your foot soldiers out in the rain.

Seriously, it was a waste of resources.

And yet, today, this brightly-dressed woman was having such a success on a day with substantial blowing snow. Her secret? I think she made everyone who stopped their cars at the lights want to be as happy as she was. She made you want to be dancing to bouncy, boppy Christmas music on a busy intersection on a cold, windy, snowy day—just like her. By scoring smiles, she scored donations. It was she who won the money, not the mission of the non-profit she was fundraising for.

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Published:
January 19, 2011 – 11:12 pm
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By steph
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Cartoon: the state of design affairs

I’d just finished a cartoon for my talk at Paris Web next week. I’ll be speaking about how we can get away from the industrial-revolution-style, deliverable-churning machine mindset that is still plaguing how we create digital products and design user experiences.

Published:
October 10, 2010 – 11:00 pm
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By steph
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Thoughts on Transmedia Storytelling @ Project Columbus

I spent a good part of today at INIS’ first Project Columbus event on Transmedia Storytelling.

To those of us who live and breathe the web, and who have grown up with the cacophony of various media all going at the same time, “transmedia storytelling” seems like a fancy name for an experience that we have come to expect. For example: how the movie Avatar had a game that was a prequel, or that Batman is a framework where you can begin to experience the story through many entry points — various films, TV series and the comics. One other great but lesser known example is the film “All About Lily Chou-Chou”, which began as an online novel and forum, and thereafter content from the forum was used in the film. So for me, today’s event was somewhat a reminder that the majority of more established industries such as film (the primary audience today) — and publishing — are still trying to figure a way forward.

I didn’t have the foresight to live-blog the day and I had to leave the afternoon panel session early, but here are a few thoughts that came to mind based on the discussion between panelists, and comments/questions posed by the audience:

  • There is this impression that it’s a case of “we know best” (more traditional marketing/branding strategies) vs “our audience knows best” (the web 2.0 that social media experts advocate). In reality, the basis of designing a good experience is the balance of the two. This balance may not always be exactly tipped the same way for a website, a TV show, a mobile app, or even across different media. We need to balance what our audience want to know and do, against what we want them to know and do — and there is no right formula for these individual design decisions.
  • It’s not just about which demographics we need to talk to or not, but about taking a look at the broad range of user segments based on their motivations, which would resemble a gradient of needs rather than a black and white picture. Julien made the very valid point that it’s not about which audience we choose to speak to — we don’t actually have a choice — it’s about who wants to participate.
  • In a many-to-many conversation that’s created around a story and content, the emphasis has to be less about the content and story you have to tell, but more about the voice with which you speak. Being able to craft a consistent voice would allow for a more cohesive presence that’s easily identifiable regardless of medium. In a way, we can think of this as relinquishing control, but we are shifting control to a broader parameter. It’s like deciding what first impressions you want to make before arriving to a party (and therefore deciding on how to dress), but letting go and allow conversations to flow without controlling what gets said between you and people you meet.
  • There is no right process, because there’s no right answer. However, there are plenty of problem solving frameworks we can adopt and refine.

You may recognise that these four points also apply to user experience design for more innovative, social applications. I know it seems a bit of a downer to say “there is no right way”, but imagine what possibilities we have at hand to explore and to find out what works for each type of project! Having no right answer simply means we have the space to dream.

Published:
June 9, 2010 – 8:56 pm
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By steph
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