On instruction vs. understanding

I’ve assembled a lot of IKEA furniture in my life, and along the way I’ve learned a few things, such as:

  • Every piece of IKEA furniture comes with an identical Allen wrench, which you will only ever use to assemble that piece of furniture, and which will forever after gather dust in a drawer in your basement with all of the other identical Allen wrenches you’ve acquired at IKEA.
  • A lot of stuff that looks like wood is actually a woodgrain pattern printed on plastic-coated paper, wrapped around a block of glued-together sawdust.
  • Every piece of IKEA furniture will take two hours to assemble, no matter how large or small, or how many separate pieces it contains.
  • Assembly might take slightly less time if you possess a Ph.D in archaeology with a special emphasis in either Egyptian or Mayan hieroglyphics.
  • You will almost always realize 2/3 of the way through the process that you are doing it backwards.
  • It never gets any easier.

Those universal hieroglyphic assembly instructions are, along with the ubiquitous Allen wrench and product names featuring umlauts or o’s with slashes through them, the most easily mocked symbol of IKEA. The pictures are often inscrutable, and the overall impression overwhelming. More than once I have felt compelled simply to curl up in the corner of the room and weep silently.

But written assembly instructions (from other companies, of course) are often far, far worse. If I can’t make sense of a diagram showing exactly how the parts fit together, how am I possibly supposed to understand written instructions along the lines of “insert the ball socket assembly into the reverse threaded wall mount bracket and affix with the supplied 8mm Torx screws and self-locking bushings”? (OK, I just made that up, but it sounds real, doesn’t it? Wait, what are you doing over there in the corner?)

And therein lies the problem: there is a great mental chasm between instructions and understanding. It doesn’t matter what form the instructions take: written, visual, verbal, semaphore. Whether you approach them in an unthinking, just-get-it-done, “paint by numbers” fashion, or you attempt to read and absorb them all before beginning, instructions can only communicate so much.

Recently I attempted to assemble and install a curtain wire system from IKEA, for the purpose of hanging posters from bulldog clips at the new Room 34 studio. The instructions supplied with the curtain wire were some of the most panic-inducing I’ve ever seen from IKEA, and that’s saying something.

The first two times I tried to put this thing together, I just gave up. Then I decided not even to bother with the instructions. Instead, I closely examined the various parts, until I came to my own understanding of how they fit together, and how it all attached to the wall. From that point, I was able to refer back to the instructions in a new way, as a reminder of my own thought processes, rather than as a bizarre alien communication from some distant Hömwørld.

I’ve been in IKEA’s shoes, though. Not literally. I don’t think they sell shoes, although I have seen fuzzy slippers there in a big wire bin for 99 cents a pair. But I have had to prepare instructions myself, and to lead training sessions where I attempt to communicate to my clients how to use web applications I have developed for them. It’s a challenge.

How much information is too much; how much is too little? What is the right information to convey, and what can they do without? Is it better to provide a broad foundation of knowledge or a targeted “cheat sheet” of most commonly used tasks? How do I stop instructing people and help them to understand?

I don’t have the answers. I’m still exploring. In my own experience, it’s direct, hands-on activities that are directly applicable to solving real-world problems that best allow me to develop my own unique understanding of how a system works. But it can be incredibly difficult and time-consuming as an instructor to develop suitable training materials and create an environment where that type of learning can take place.

Beware the self-identified “expert”

Every field of human endeavor has its experts: those individuals who, through the right combination of talent, practice, and experience, acquire the highest levels of knowledge and skill within that field.

It is also one of the most basic observations about life and learning that the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. As such, those who know the most are also (often) the most keenly aware of their own limitations, and are therefore the least likely to comfortably inhabit the identity of “expert.”

And yet, plenty of people proudly inflate their own status to that level, be they charlatans seeking unearned power and influence, or earnest practitioners of lesser abilities, who are simply benignly unaware of their own limitations (if such ignorance can truly be benign). It doesn’t help that we live in a world of “resumé inflation”, where everyone is an expert in everything, simply by virtue of putting those words on a piece of paper.

Of course there are also the occasional “true” experts who act as provocateurs — or simply have raging egos — who may be aware not only of their own limitations, but also of the even more extreme limitations of everyone else around them, and who leverage that knowledge for greater personal gain. But we have another word for these people. (Assholes.)

The challenge then is this: how do we identify those on whom we can most rely to share their “expertise”, if the true expert refuses the label and the self-identified expert is anything but?

I think the answer is simple: we find experts by the admiration of their peers.

Unless they’re all assholes too.

A note about the photo above: That’s Pete Prodoehl, a guy I don’t know much about but whose website I’ve long been aware of, and who does not appear to self-identify as an expert (except in the seemingly tongue-in-cheek way of this photo). But I found the photo on a post on a douchey motivational website for aspiring entrepreneurs, encouraging “expert” self-identification, while not bothering to identify, credit, or link to Pete’s website. Take all of this as you will.

The :first-child conundrum

Update (April 24, 2024): Yeah, this is a really old post. :first-of-type has existed for years now. Maybe it even existed when I wrote this in 2012, but I wasn’t aware of it.

I like to think I’m a pretty adept CSS developer. I may not have written the book, but I have a solid understanding of CSS and can do some sophisticated things with it.

But one place I always get snagged with CSS is in using the :first-child pseudoclass. The idea behind :first-child is that you can apply different styles to the first child element inside a parent element than for the rest of the instances of that child element inside the same parent.

A way I end up wanting to use it a lot is to give the first child different margins than the rest. Maybe most of them need margin-top: 2em; for instance, but I want the first one to be flush to the top of the parent by using margin-top: 0; to override the default margin.

The full CSS might end up looking like this:

div>h2 { margin-top: 2em; }
div>h2:first-child { margin-top: 0; }

And then that would be put together with some HTML like this:

<div id=”content”>

<h2>First header</h2>
<p>This is the first paragraph!</p>

<h2>Second header</h2>
<p>And, surprise! This is the second paragraph!</p>

</div>

So far, so good. The problem is, what if you stick something else into the <div> before the first <h2> that isn’t another <h2>? Say, something like this:

<div id=”content”>

<div class=”floating_sidebar”>This should be floating to
the right of the content.</div>

<h2>First header</h2>
<p>This is the first paragraph!</p>

<h2>Second header</h2>
<p>And, surprise! This is the second paragraph!</p>

</div>

You may have guessed at this point that I’m not describing a hypothetical situation here. This is a stripped-down version of exactly what I’m building right now. The problem is, now the first <h2> is no longer the first child element of the parent <div> overall, so the :first-child CSS gets ignored.

True, it’s not the first child element, altogether, inside the parent. But it is the first <h2> child inside the parent. I can understand how, in other circumstances — say, if the inserted <div> wasn’t a float — you’d want the h2:first-child not to apply here. But in general it seems to me that if you’re specifying a tag with your :first-child, it should only matter that it’s the first tag of that type under the parent, even if there are other different tags before it.

I guess the real solution here would be to create another pseudo-class that does what I want. Now I just need to convince the standards folks and the browser makers to do that.

Note: The sample HTML was kind of a mess when I originally posted this. That’s what happens when you write a blog post in a hurry before rushing out the door for a meeting. It has now been corrected, and I made some other edits for clarity while I was at it.

The real reason Android is (and has always been) in trouble

Over on Daring Fireball, John Gruber links to a Business Insider piece by Jay Yarow, called “Android Is Suddenly in a Lot of Trouble.”

Gruber responds:

It’s not that Android is suddenly in a lot of trouble — it’s that a lot of people are suddenly realizing that Android has been in trouble all along.

Exactly. But he doesn’t go on to mention why it’s been in trouble all along (though as I recall, he has in the past). I’ve seen plenty of reports, like this one from comScore that iPhones use WiFi networks significantly more than Android phones in the U.S. and U.K. This is one way of measuring the qualitative differences in how people use iPhones compared to how they use Android phones. You could also talk about app revenue, for instance.

All of these measurements and analysis revolve around one clear conclusion, especially when one considers how people end up walking out of a store with either an iPhone or an Android phone. Carriers are pushing Android because they can control the experience more. They’re giving away Android phones as stock upgrade models when customers’ contracts come up. People who don’t even care about owning a “smartphone” are bringing home Android phones because that’s just what the sales rep at the store recommended.

Android is in trouble because a lot of its users (the majority? the vast majority?) are just using it as a phone. It’s a commodity. A lot of the people buying it don’t really know or care what it is, and will never actively use its full potential. It’s just a phone. It may be capable of much more, but if it’s not being used for more, what difference does that make?

People who go into a store wanting to purchase a smartphone predominantly choose the iPhone. Not all of them, of course. Tech-savvy people do choose other smartphone platforms, including Android, especially those who want to tinker with the system. But the rest take whatever they are told to buy by their carriers’ sales reps.

This is the biggest reason Android tablets haven’t taken off, and it’s been discussed too. There’s a built-in market for the apathetic purchase of an Android smartphone. But no one (well, I hope) is walking into a cellular carrier’s store and saying “I want a tablet. What tablet do you recommend?” People who want a tablet don’t just want a tablet; overwhelmingly they want an iPad. Most people who don’t want an iPad don’t want a tablet at all. (Almost) everybody needs a phone.

The problem for the carriers, and the reason they’ve been promoting Android, has typically been that Apple retains too much control (from the carriers’ perspective) over the iPhone. That’s not likely to change, but with Windows Phone, suddenly the carriers have other options. Microsoft is definitely keeping a tighter rein on Windows Phone than Google does with Android, but with Windows Phone, the carriers still have options they don’t get with the iPhone. (Not that this lack of control has prevented them from selling millions of the things.)

If Verizon is serious about pushing Windows Phone (along with the fact that they still sell huge numbers of iPhones), then we’ll soon begin to see just how Android was, as Gruber says, in trouble all along. The success it has achieved to date was largely dependent upon carriers pushing it on unsuspecting or indifferent customers. If they stop doing that…

Where’ve I been?

Image

It’s been nearly a month since my last blog post. What happened?

Well, this happened:

That would be the reception area at the front of the new Room 34 Creative Services studio. The business has moved out of my house and into a real storefront space. It’s been a lot of work (plus, I’ve had a lot of work to do anyway), so the blog has suffered. Never fear, I’m still here!

More to come…