June 2019 | You are so many things
1
WHEN YOU GROW UP
Did you grow up imagining what you would be when you finally achieved that dream of adulthood? The time when you’d get to do what you wanted, and you wouldn’t have to listen to anyone else’s commands? Yeah, me too.
My earliest memory is of planning to be a pilot (adult me doesn’t like the smell of planes (but I would like to see a sunset from the cockpit someday)). I harbored dreams of being an astronaut (I get motion sickness doing a single pirouette). I wanted to be a chemist (until chemistry was the science class in which I received my worst grade). And for a while, a span of years, I wanted to be a pastry chef (I am a pretty great baker, actually, but I was still in my teens when I realized I didn’t want to stand up all night creating someone else’s 5 AM croissant, only to fall into bed as the rest of the world woke).
So many dreams. So many paths. So many choices. The job I do now—UX content designer—didn’t exist when I was a kid. My prior jobs—on foot at a kitchen goods retailer, at desks at companies tiny and massive, tech and otherwise—took me on a circuitous route and brought me here, to this job that didn’t exist until recently, for a product that was pure imagination, the stuff of fantasy, not all that long ago. It’s a job that suits me, and I’ve had a few of those—jobs I began without quite knowing what was in store before realizing they were tailor-made for my exact skills.
When we ask kids what they want to be, we communicate to them that adulthood is about work, about career, about climbing a ladder. We tell them they get to be one thing. (They’ll get to be so many things.) The question indicates that we, at our most paramount, are our job. It tells children nothing of being a decent person, of being kind or honest or gentle with someone else’s feelings. And it’s a distortion. We are not our jobs. And our jobs are not just one thing. They are an evolution of ourselves, as we continue our growth from childhood to adulthood, as we continue our growth, full stop (for growth doesn’t cease when one turns 18 or 22 or 54 or 75). Our selves are in flux all the time. We are learning all the time. Not just as children, not only in college or grad school. And we do ourselves and our children a disservice when we tell them that their future is but a job. That it is fixed, or imply that should be. We move, always, forward, often towards things we couldn’t have imagined mere years ago.
2
NPS DRAMA
If you’ve ever worked on a product at a company, you’ve likely encountered NPS. In my previous role, I primarily encountered NPS in employee satisfaction surveys and discovered, long after I’d unwittingly given several “neutral” and “detractor” scores to my team, that NPS is measured in three buckets: AMAZING, so neutral as to mean nothing at all, and the-worst-thing-I’ve-ever-encountered. And that amazing score? You only have an 18% chance of hitting it.
Here’s how NPS works: You have an 11-point scale (0-10) on which to rate whether you’d recommend something—a product, a company, an experience—to family and friends. An answer anywhere in the first seven points of this scale (0-6)? Worthless garbage. The next two points (7-8)? Those mean nothing. Zero. Nary an impact. And the top two points (9-10)? Those scores dazzle. We can hang the moon from those scores. The night sky twinkles because someone selected a nine or a 10.
I don’t get dazzled super easily, so in my book, giving something a seven out of 10 was pretty great, my score of five indicates acceptance with room for improvement, and a two or below indicates abject dislike. But on the NPS scale, a five and a two are treated the same and indicate a level of disgust and despair I should hope no product I’m using merits. A score of seven—a score I would bestow thinking what I’m scoring is pretty great—represents a void; it counts for naught. A nine or a 10 are all that matter for NPS. Everything else is garbage, or worse. If I rate everything a nine or a 10, everything is the best so nothing is the best.
NPS is entrenched in business metrics, so what else can you use? CSAT. Better questions. Fewer than 11 answers for the multiple choice question (try three). And connect the right metrics-gathering method to the user flow so the questions are relevant to the experience.
3
BE MEDIOCRE
I used to describe myself as a perfectionist. I don’t think I actually am; it’s more that, historically, I didn’t want people to see me fail. (I’ve gotten quite a bit better at that, at failing openly.)
It may be even harder to avoid that sense of perfectionism in this world we live online, where we filter our photos and blur our portraits, placing a layer of perfect atop our regular ol’ selves.
A life lived hidden, a life lived without risk, is not much of a life, though, so get out there and try something new. Be bad at something. Fail. And then try it again.
As a privacy advocate, facial recognition makes me right nervous. I like to think that by limiting photos I post of myself online, my visage won’t be cataloged in facial recognition databases. But I work in tech (in big data!), and I keep myself abreast of technology news, so I know that I’m sticking my head in the proverbial sand by holding out hope that the small steps I take personally will keep me out of the machine operating at a grander scale than I can fathom.
So, I’ve been delighted to see cities and states taking action to protect the privacy rights of those who live or visit there, requiring consent to use biometric information or banning facial recognition use by law enforcement.
I want to walk outside without wondering what nuances of my body are being captured for analysis. I want to walk without thinking about what others are thinking of me. I just want to walk. And think. And be.
4
PRIVACY PROGRESS
5
SMART CITY DATA EXPOSED
And on the other end of the spectrum … Smart cities aren’t always protecting their residents’ privacy as well as one would hope.