The Difference Between People-Speak and Programmer-Speak

After I gave my presentation the other week, someone asked a question. It was:

So, basically what you’re doing is data-mining?

And I said, no, well yes, but that’s not how I think about it. I see it as creating something that will help people understand their use of Twitter. The fact that I achieve this by data mining is by-the-by.

Maybe when we speak to other programmers it’s OK to say something like, “I’m data-mining social graphs in Twitter and visualizing them” but when we speak to our users, that may not mean very much to them. What’s more, I don’t think I would have come up the idea to do that if I’d gone to Twitter with the intention of data-mining. This didn’t come from me as a programmer with an interest in data-mining, or an interest in visualization (as an aside, I took a course in visualization at Edinburgh and hated it. Mostly because we were coding in Tcl). It came from me as a Twitter user, wanting a better way to measure engagement than followers/following.

Yesterday, I wrote a little bit about the journey that brought me to Ottawa. I think I’ve finally realized what I’m passionate about. It’s people. It’s users. This is why I’m so fascinated about what I’m working on right now – what’s more people than social networking? It’s also why I’m so interested in Usability. I’ve read every article on Don Norman’s website, I find usability so interesting, so important.

I’m passionate about giving users what they want – that’s usability, better ways to display data, etc. That’s creating the things they say they want.

Even more so, though, I’m passionate about giving user what they want, that they don’t realize they want yet. In small ways, that’s telling people who are emailing spreadsheets about Google Docs, or explaining to someone frustrated by their web designer about the simplicity and ease of use of WordPress. In bigger ways, it’s been taking a mess of spreadsheets and turning it into a database that can answer questions that users hadn’t even thought to ask. It’s been creating something that’s can make you really aware of your conversational network, and encourage you to talk to new people (the most rewarding feedback I got was from someone who told me they were now making an effort to speak to more people after seeing their graph). I hope these things are just the beginning.

So, what do I want to be when I grow up? I want to be a programmer who speaks fluent human. How about you?