Month: October 2023

Why do websites have images? They up space on pages, take time to download, and are costly to create.

The reason is, I think, because our brains process images far faster than text.

An ecommerce website selling red and blue shoes has text to tell you which is which, but they also have images. They know that we make really quick, snap decisions when we process information visually.

Images on ecommerce websites are an easy and obvious example, but images serve other purposes too. They can help set the emotional tone of the website, direct people’s attention, and provide information. But overall, all images on websites serve the same purpose; they provide mental shortcuts.

So, what might happen if we put the wrong images on a web page? Obviously wrong images, like red shoes on the blue shoes listing, might create confusion. More subtly wrong images might create harder to grasp dissonances that feel wrong in ways we can’t explain. Images of people smiling on a web page about funerals, for example.

I’ve often thought that the role of the manager is to balance opposites. One of those balances I’ve been pondering recently is between ensuring the success of a project and giving people the opportunity to learn from failure.

With the benefit of experience, I can see where projects are going wrong, where teams have gaps in their thinking, where processes are creating unintended consequences. But I only have that knowledge and experience because others have let me fail and learn from it.

So, how to approach the balancing between projects succeeding in the short-term and people succeeding in the long-term?

Let’s start at the extremes.

Focusing only on the success of the project would see managers taking a more directive role, telling people what to do, and so preventing any learning that means those people can lead successful projects in the future. We don’t want that.

Focusing only on giving people learning opportunities means managers accepting lots of failure. Project success is important. It brings opportunities. If every project fails, pretty quickly new projects don’t get started, and those learning opportunities are lost. We don’t want that either.

Where’s the balance?

Maybe it’s in the practices a manager works on with the project team. Practices that create the right kind of learning environment, one that helps people identify the gaps in their knowledge in find ways to fill them, and help people deliver successful projects.

Here’s three practices managers can try:

Make the work small, and make it visible. Think of these small pieces of work as safe-to-fail experiments, so that if they do fail they have minimal impact on the overall project.

Give and help people get regular, fast feedback. This should be person-to-person feedback, but just as important is feedback from users on the work. The best feedback helps us understand if we’re achieving the outcomes we want.

Encourage everyone to share their knowledge and experience, not only within their job role but also bring perspectives from their life experiences. This helps everyone learn from each other.

A couple of weeks ago I became fascinated by personal websites that have “Hi, I’m…” on the home page, but I wasn’t sure why. There’s something different about a website that speaks in the first person.

Having thought about it some more, I think it’s about how we anthropomorphise technology and how it intermediates relationships between people, especially those we don’t know.

We say, “Hey, Alexa” to speak to voice assistants as if there is a person listening and waiting for us.

Phones mediate how we talk to each other.

And, a website that speaks in the first person creates a different kind of connection between people.