Ten, twenty years later

Starting a blog has been on my New Year’s resolution list for probably the past four years. Start writing again. Publish something on the internet. I had loved it when I was younger and I’ve been trying to reconnect with that person I was then. I think I was 15 or 16 when I taught myself HTML, found some free web hosting, and published my own “journal” for years. I felt very elitist about LiveJournal when it became popular shortly after because it didn’t require any coding skills to publish something, but did eventually switch over towards the end of high school and blogged there for a few more years through college, before moving to Wordpress (in Italian for some reason) in grad school. That was a short-lived blog. But I digress.

I loved looking up hex codes to make color palettes, putting images in tables, and writing quirky and edgy stuff to my small audience of maybe just a couple friends (I don’t really know if anyone read it, but I’m pretty sure it was linked in my AIM profile and I really wanted people to read it).

Circa 2001, in my room at the height of my blogging renaissance. Complete with punk rock posters and jones soda labels on the wall. 

This early experience sparked my deep interest in how humans interact with the internet and how the internet helps humans interact/communicate with each other (and now their things). I also love thinking about how humans interact with their digital interfaces (i.e. HCI—human-computer interaction), whether that’s web or app design, wearables, or voice assistants. Trying to understand and anticipate human behavior leaves so much space for users of your design to mess up.

Early in my academic career in linguistics, I studied under Dr. Jeri Jaeger at the University at Buffalo. She was the first scholar to study kids’ slips of the tongue and she made some groundbreaking hypotheses about how those speech errors reflected insight into how children learn language. I later went on to study and write an unpublished paper on speech errors in a conceptual blending framework. This same framework of studying errors applies to interface design, formalized as ‘problem definition’ in many product management frameworks. In particular, I love when my voice assistants misunderstand me and I think a lot about how they can be improved. Did it parse that high front vowel as too low, leading to the misunderstanding of a specific word (in which case, the lower threshold of the mapping to the second formant frequency probably just needs to be lowered a bit) or was my phrasing too colloquial or silly or slow that the computer could no longer deduct meaning?

Regardless, I just think it’s so funny to declare user error rather than admitting to a design flaw. In any sort of design scenario… digital and mechanical interfaces, event orchestration, and even academic course design. Sure, sometimes it’s true, and a student straight up doesn’t read a syllabus or a new homeowner inputs the wrong Wi-Fi SSID when setting up a new router, thereby ‘breaking’ all the connections with previously commissioned smart home devices (this was definitely me and it was definitely a pain in the ass to recommission all those devices). But it goes without saying, that people who design things, write code, and curate experiences can learn so much from these mistakes.

So, that’s why “User Error” for this blog. It shows up in my life in so many ways, I have to laugh about it. And now I kinda want to write about it too. When my voice assistants misunderstand me, when things go wrong even when I thought I did everything right, when I can’t get the cardboard granola bar and tampon boxes to fold neatly for recycling (seriously, have box manufacturers gone mad?).

And why now? Today would have been my tenth wedding anniversary. I don’t feel there’s much to say in particular about that at this point, but it felt like a significant enough date to pull the trigger and spin this website up after many years of thinking about it and procrastinating.

So I’m not entirely sure what I might post here, but I sometimes do get the urge to write, so why not have a dedicated space to do it. Here I am, ten years after embarking on my failed marriage (maybe my biggest moment of user error to date) and nearly twenty years since I last published a blog. If you’re still here, thanks for reading this far. I’ll write again soon.