Conceptual Model

Today, I finished reading a book written by Donald Norman – The Design of Future Things.  It only has 191 pages and I only spend 1 week to finish it.  The book use the design of future automobile as an example to illustrate the design of future thing: symbiosis.  It has the summary of the design rules at the last page.

“….
Design Rules for Human Designers of ‘Smart’ Machines:

1. Provide rich, complex, and natural signals
2. Be predictable
3. Provide good conceptual models
4. Make the output understandable
5. Provide continual awareness without annoyance
6. Exploit natural mappings

Design Rules Developed by Machines to Improve Their Interactions with People

1. Keep things simple
2. Give people a conceptual model
3. Give reasons
4. Make people think they are in control
5. Continually reassure
6. Never label human behavior as ‘error’. (Rule added by the human interviewer)
   …”

I learn concept model when I take a course of research methodology but I never realize that it can apply to design.  By the same token, it should also be applicable to management and system development.

Unless you read through the book, you may not understand the above rules thoroughly.  This is another book of Donald Norman besides Emotional Design I would mostly recommend to my peers.  Devour it!

Web Programming II

It has been 2 months passed for me to recap the web programming techniques – asp.net, ado.net, html, infragistics controls, above all, the damn Javascript.  The Javascript almost ruined my life and career.

My Life:

1. I come to realize that I am really getting old when writing Javascript.  I often forget that it is case sensitive.  I only know that after several hours of debugging and I often found shadow when I am looking at characters.
2. I often forget to add semi-colon at the end of a line.
3. I have used Google with frequency more than the summation of times I have ever used before.  I am not familiar with CSS (style), Html format command, Html properties & methods.  Sometimes, the results found for some command are invalid and I need to test many times and re-search it in Google to locate the right answer.  I wonder why those invalid answers still exist to fool people.  For example, I want to remove a hidden field.  1 post told that the method should be document.getElementById(“form1”).removeChild(“hiddenfield”); but it does not work.  I have to do the following first:
1. Find the parent of “hiddenfield” first, that is: parent = document.getElementById(“hiddenfield”).parentNode;
2. then use the parent to trigger the method of removing the child: parent.removeChild(document.getElementById(“hiddenfield”));
3. Unfortunately, I came to know after 2 nights of debug/search/test/debug.  Damn it!
4. I locked myself to my home office after dinner with my family every night for 2 months.  I slept late during trip since my family would not disturb me.  I only slept 5 hours a day.
5. My mind was wondering even when I was cycling the electrical bicycle.

My Career:

1. In my mind, it is full of Javascript code and I even forget some critical finance figures
2. I tried to speed up some meetings with my peers so that I could write the Javascript
3. I rarely ate at canteen as I remained in the office during lunch hours.  The staff seemed to feel that I no longer cared about the quality of the food in canteen.
4. I did not join some staff activities after office hours as I devoted most of my after-office hours to Javascript.
5. Sometimes, I mix up Javascript with VBA and do some messy job with some new report program!
6. I have not read any books from January to March.  I found my English standard a little bit downgraded.  I keep reading English books to keep myself fluent in English writing and speaking.

If I could not write a robust Javascript program this time, I will never touch it!

Communication–III: The Few manages The Mass; The Mass monitors The Few

Before I present the practical way of bi-directional communication, I would like to further elaborate some advocate of management.  This is borrowed from political system.  The Few manages The Mass; The Mass, in turn, monitors The Few.  It is quite similar to the principles of “Support Down, Challenge Up”.  The have-power is always the few while the have-not-power is always the mass. 

The grandmother knowledge is: when The Few comes to power, they would come across with a stage of power familiarity.  Usually, humility is the prelude as long as The Few is intelligent.  But intelligence does not mean fully humility.  Once The Few gets some success, complacence takes effect.  The underlying reasons may be as follows:

1. Human nature of laziness.  Humility means the Few needs to continue spending time to listen to the Mass.  But the reward should be more resources or time to the have-power per se.
2. First things first; but which should be first?  The mistake of having chosen the wrong action would pose the Few into a dilemma, either acknowledge or defend the wrong-doing.  The incorrect pick up of the latter would further dampen the situation
3. Insufficient tolerance or incorrect tolerance of mistakes made by the direct report.  Problem always arise when there is a turning point from one pole to the other pole while nobody considers where the equilibrium point is.
4. The supremacy of power.  If the have-power is not respected by the well notification of incidence, it would feel humiliated and losing esteem.  But for the have-not-power, it is quite difficult to find which incident should be notified and which should not.  It is quite similar to speculate the temper of the have-power.  And you never succeed!

Then it comes to the question of setting up this paradigm: The Few manages The Mass; The Mass monitors The Few

Q.    When to set up the paradigm?
A.    Before the Have-Power comes to fully grasp the power

Q.    Who to set up the paradigm?
A.    The Have-Power, but before he/she comes to fully grasp the power

Q.    How to set up the paradigm?
A.    Set up a open communication channel so that The Few is accustomed to getting to know the critics from The Mass

Q.    Where to set up the paradigm?
A.    Inside the organization but open to the general public

Q.    What to set up for the paradigm?
A.    A Bulletin Board with anonymous registration of members

Q.    Why to set up the paradigm?
A.    To avoid deterioration of quality management.

Q.    To Whom this paradigm is for?
A.    The Mass and The Few.