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Imagine that you are in a job interview , the first thing you encounter is a purposefully unpredictable off-the-wall question like: "A penguin walks through that door right now wearing a sombrero. What does he say and why is he here?" or "How many windows are in New York City?" According to Glassdoor's Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions survey, these questions were actually asked during interviews at Clark Construction and Bain & Company.
Other times, you'll encounter the same old, same old questions you've come to expect: "Tell me about yourself," "What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?" and "Why did you leave your last job?" Still other times you will be asked behavior-based questions that classically begin with "Tell me about a time when…" or "How would you do…?"
Regardless of which kind of approach is taken, the whole idea behind these questions for which there is no one right answer is less about the actual content but rather to discern aspects about your personality, work style, values, perspective and how your mind works. These are all things one can't reliably ask directly.
Nonetheless, you can anticipate legitimate issues of any employer's concern, prepare by crafting stories in response to these questions and display yourself in the best possible light.
1. Do you show up for work? On one very basic level, an employer wants to know that you live within a reasonable commuting distance so that you are able to arrive on time and not be mentally fatigued. But on a deeper level, be prepared to demonstrate with your answer that you actually care about your work, take it seriously and are psychologically engaged as opposed to just physically present.
Do you immediately accept the challenge of figuring out how many windows are in New York? Do you relish the opportunity and show how you would dig in to go about finding a reasonable approximation? Can you talk about how in the past you jumped into a job or project with both feet first?
2. Are you flexible? Prepare stories that demonstrate you can adapt to changing circumstances and needs. Can you speak about how you have adjusted your schedule, come in early and left late or adapted to the work style of a new boss or different team members? Are you willing to shift your priorities and work style to meet the needs of others?
What stories can you tell to demonstrate that you can go with the flow to help get done whatever needs to happen?
3. Are you ambitious? Few people can actually predict what they will be doing five years from now. But can you talk about the overall arc of your career up to this point? Do the transitions from one position to the next over the course of your professional life make sense, or are they happenstance? Can you articulate the general direction in which you want to move?
What have you done to propel your career forward up to this point? And, are you relying on what you did in 1985 and how you did it to get hired today? Do you think that the skills and knowledge you have will get you by for the long haul, or what are your plans to keep up with the latest and greatest information, innovations, trends and technology?
Put simply: can you articulate a vision of what you want to accomplish in the job for which you are applying, and beyond? And can you weave this vision into the narrative you tell?
4. How well do you communicate? It is rare to find a job description that doesn't include strong communications skills among the requirements, and few are the résumés that don't claim that those skills. Most interviewers will judge your level of intelligence and your attitude by the way you speak and convey your own personal story.
Often, interview questions are purposefully open-ended to see how you will respond when challenged. Do you summon relevant facts and stories from your past, or do you meander through an answer without dealing with the concern of your interviewer? Do you engage through dialogue, open body language and clarity of thought? Do you understand when enough has been said and it is time to stop speaking?
When you take the time to step back from the interview process to think about the underlying concerns of any employer, you can gain valuable perspective. Then you can go about effectively crafting your own stories with these concerns, and thereby increase your odds of hearing the words that every job hunter craves: "You're hired."
Happy hunting!
]]>Imagine that you are in a job interview , the first thing you encounter is a purposefully unpredictable off-the-wall question like: "A penguin walks through that door right now wearing a sombrero. What does he say and why is he here?" or "How many windows are in New York City?" According to Glassdoor's Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions survey, these questions were actually asked during interviews at Clark Construction and Bain & Company.
Other times, you'll encounter the same old, same old questions you've come to expect: "Tell me about yourself," "What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?" and "Why did you leave your last job?" Still other times you will be asked behavior-based questions that classically begin with "Tell me about a time when…" or "How would you do…?"
Regardless of which kind of approach is taken, the whole idea behind these questions for which there is no one right answer is less about the actual content but rather to discern aspects about your personality, work style, values, perspective and how your mind works. These are all things one can't reliably ask directly.
Nonetheless, you can anticipate legitimate issues of any employer's concern, prepare by crafting stories in response to these questions and display yourself in the best possible light.
1. Do you show up for work? On one very basic level, an employer wants to know that you live within a reasonable commuting distance so that you are able to arrive on time and not be mentally fatigued. But on a deeper level, be prepared to demonstrate with your answer that you actually care about your work, take it seriously and are psychologically engaged as opposed to just physically present.
Do you immediately accept the challenge of figuring out how many windows are in New York? Do you relish the opportunity and show how you would dig in to go about finding a reasonable approximation? Can you talk about how in the past you jumped into a job or project with both feet first?
2. Are you flexible? Prepare stories that demonstrate you can adapt to changing circumstances and needs. Can you speak about how you have adjusted your schedule, come in early and left late or adapted to the work style of a new boss or different team members? Are you willing to shift your priorities and work style to meet the needs of others?
What stories can you tell to demonstrate that you can go with the flow to help get done whatever needs to happen?
3. Are you ambitious? Few people can actually predict what they will be doing five years from now. But can you talk about the overall arc of your career up to this point? Do the transitions from one position to the next over the course of your professional life make sense, or are they happenstance? Can you articulate the general direction in which you want to move?
What have you done to propel your career forward up to this point? And, are you relying on what you did in 1985 and how you did it to get hired today? Do you think that the skills and knowledge you have will get you by for the long haul, or what are your plans to keep up with the latest and greatest information, innovations, trends and technology?
Put simply: can you articulate a vision of what you want to accomplish in the job for which you are applying, and beyond? And can you weave this vision into the narrative you tell?
4. How well do you communicate? It is rare to find a job description that doesn't include strong communications skills among the requirements, and few are the résumés that don't claim that those skills. Most interviewers will judge your level of intelligence and your attitude by the way you speak and convey your own personal story.
Often, interview questions are purposefully open-ended to see how you will respond when challenged. Do you summon relevant facts and stories from your past, or do you meander through an answer without dealing with the concern of your interviewer? Do you engage through dialogue, open body language and clarity of thought? Do you understand when enough has been said and it is time to stop speaking?
When you take the time to step back from the interview process to think about the underlying concerns of any employer, you can gain valuable perspective. Then you can go about effectively crafting your own stories with these concerns, and thereby increase your odds of hearing the words that every job hunter craves: "You're hired."
Happy hunting!
]]>
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In chess, the psychological dimension that springs from a dialogue between two brains, two ideas, two strategic conceptions that depend on the personality of each chess player has long been somewhat of a romantic mystery. How do Grandmasters think? What strategies do they use?
More often than not, the most successful strategies are rooted in our very own nature. And common to most Grandmasters is that they almost never take the easy way out. A different, better alternative is always available, and they go looking for it. That creativity, that compulsion, that drive to look beyond what comes instinctively is what fuels successful strategies and explains why so few Grandmasters are out there.
(Image credits: Mukumbura)
For most of us, however, things are simpler. We tend to favor the shortest path, the easy way out, the shortcut. We cut through the middle of the park if we have to.
We’re naturally lazy. When we think, we search for the nearest pattern, and when we find the pattern, we don’t need to think anymore — we just follow the pattern. Our brains have evolved to be — borrowing Edward de Bono’s expression — “brilliantly uncreative.”
This preference for shortcuts is what Grandmasters naturally exploit. Playing on well-known weaknesses, automatisms or unconscious actions has long been a common strategy in chess.
When it comes to using and interacting with technology, that underlying behavior seems to hold. Users unconsciously look for the line of least resistance — la loi du moindre effort, as psycholinguist François Richaudeau called it. Richaudeau’s work revolved around words, but considering how vital communication, language and words are to the design of interactions, the core principles still apply: The shortest words will be those emitted, understood and read with the minimum of effort, and also those most frequently employed due to their more profound presence — or incrustation — in our memory.
We remember shorter words better. That’s because, according to Kenneth S. Goodman, we process graphic, syntactic and semantic information simultaneously. In doing so, users carry out cycles of sampling, predicting, testing and confirming as strategies to bring in “the most reliable prediction with the minimum use of the information available.”
The process isn’t specific to words and reading, though. It underlies our behavior and interaction with the world around us.
Framing it in this way seems to suggest the generalized idea that behavioral patterns are linked to common causes — a concept expanded by behaviorism to the extent that it proposes a predictable and reliable link between a stimulus and the response it produces. That generalization is largely refuted by the cognitive revolution on the grounds that prior knowledge and mental processes intervene between a stimulus and response to reduce the predictability of human behavior — or the response — given a stimulus. Essentially, we can’t predict behavior.
While that may hold true at a micro level, there are still plenty of common paths of action in the way we work — stimulus, sensory organs, interneuron, brain, processing, motor neuron, response. It’s still safe to assume that if we design an environment in which even the subtlest of details is sympathetic to how we, as humans, work and think, and with the singular purpose of easing the experience, then users will always favor that line of least resistance.
Is the environment we design sympathetic to the way we work? (Image credits: opensourceway)
Designing an experience from a perspective that is more closely related to how we naturally strategize, designing guidance through pattern prediction, as opposed to limit enforcement, might prove to be a more viable approach.
Let’s put that in perspective. Take decision fatigue.
We all make decisions every day. Some of them big, some of them small, some conscious and some so insignificant that they slip by us without our even realizing. And in a world in which we are constantly bombarded with information and media options, such as blogs, social networks, magazines and TV, the effects of so many decisions that we have to take day by day become increasingly obvious.
Our decisions, even those that are mere preferences between option A and B, gradually take their toll on our cognitive load. The mental processes of decision-making are strenuous; we have only a finite store of mental energy available to exert self-control.
Basically, we get tired if we make too many decisions. As a result, according to Barry Schwartz, one of three things is likely to happen: we end up making poor decisions, we become more dissatisfied with our choices, or we get paralyzed and don’t choose at all.
Interaction processes — regardless of the medium — are a prime example of decision fatigue in action. At a micro level, hundreds of small, subtle and, most of the time, unconscious decisions that we take every time we use an application, browse a website or even follow an ad can affect the way we experience the artefact that we’re interacting with.
At a macro level, thanks to what we know about decision fatigue, we can predict that users can be overwhelmed to the point of making a default choice or no choice at all, depending on the option they face. One example of this is Dan Ariely’s opt-in versus opt-out example for forms of the US Department of Motor Vehicles. It shows that we can basically predict how people will react in a very specific situation by controlling the design of the application form, paying close attention to the defaults.
This is a very specific prediction of behavior. We’re not normally used to thinking of behavior as being that predictable. But in a lot of situations, it is. Ariely calls it being predictably irrational.
Contextual cues — through signs or linguistic cues, because they have the potential to refer to a specific value system — can sometimes direct cognition in particular ways, either encouraging or discouraging certain patterns of behavior. Thus, it’s vital that user experience practitioners maintain complete control over and responsibly use all elements in an interface that could be used as contextual cues and predictors.
And one of the biggest cues at the disposal of designers is language.
We, as a species, have refined language through countless iterations over the span of millennia to such an extent that words are tied to complex experiences, rather than to singular instances, by way of symbolic representation.
In 1967, Paul Watzlawick described what later became a cornerstone of communication theory: meta communication. He postulated that every communication includes, apart from the plain meaning of words, more information: information on how the talker wants to be understood and how they see themselves in relation to the receiver of the information.
Language, as a clear manifestation of the cognitive capacity of the human mind, is only a medium to carry out acts of communication. That’s one of the reasons why H.F. Bradley once said that experience is basically incommunicable.
Still, there is always something to communicate — moods, annoyances, happiness, feelings, ideas. There is always something that we need to understand — a noise, a color, a sign, a danger, an emotion. There is always some medium that is familiar to us — a grammar, an artistic language, a chess board, an interface.
While context provides a window into how people behave, words have the power to steer people towards a particular pattern of behavior through frame manipulation.
Frame manipulation invariably affects users — admittedly, to different degrees. One prime example of how the context of options and the wording of a question affects behavior is Tversky and Kahneman’s famous experiment in 1981, which demonstrated systematic reversals of preference when the same problem was presented in different ways.
The experiment required participants to make a hypothetical decision, and the researchers tried to determine whether they could steer the participants towards an answer simply by wording the questions carefully.
The experiment proposed a hypothetical outbreak of disease with 60,000 predicted deaths, and participants had to choose between two programs:
With these options, program A was a favorite among participants. But what happened when the same question was asked again, but this time, instead of counting the number of lives saved, counting the number of deaths? Here’s how the second option would have sounded:
This time around, the clear favorite was program B.
The interesting part is that the math is exactly the same for both: 40,000 out of 60,000 would die anyway. But with the first option, participants were given the choice of a gain: they were given the choice to save 20,000 people. So, the gamble was perceived as negative against the word “save.”
In the second option, participants were given the choice of a loss: 40,000 people would die, or they could gamble that none of them would die with a 30% chance.
Users were influenced simply by the wording. This later became known as the framing effect. The effect helps to explain why people are much more likely to buy meat when it’s labeled as 85% lean, instead of 15% fat. And it’s why twice as many patients opt for surgery when told they have an 80% chance of surviving, instead of a 20% chance of dying.
As the experiment demonstrates, words have the power to selectively influence a user’s perception of meaning. And, for most applications, words can also be used to elicit interactions.
Context is the barrier that makes or breaks a user’s experience. Those unconscious moments, every bit of information we discard on our way up an emotional peak, all of those fine details — they all could potentially lead to a sensible, sympathetic experience. A enjoyable experience is shaped only by context.
Some people use context and design great experiences, some don’t. Oliver Reichenstein calls it a continuum. That’s perfectly natural. We need to constantly make an effort to glance at the future once in a while — to permit ourselves educated dreams.
We need to permit ourselves to keep the vision going — from the ones whom we got it from, to the ones coming to get it. We all have the tools to do it. We just need to be responsible with them.
(al, ea, il)
© Sorin Pintilie for Smashing Magazine, 2013.
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Finals are approaching. The pressure is on for students like us.
We’re overwhelmed with work and responsibilities and we’re beginning to think that an A is no longer possible (though our story here suggests A’s are getting easier to come by…).
Still we’re in desperate need of some help to Ace that final ...
Where do we turn?
Well, for more than 1/3 of college students, the answer is prescription stimulants.
What are prescription stimulants? Adderral, Ritalin, any drug prescribed by doctors to treat ADHD or narcolepsy.
These drugs increase alertness and concentration and decrease fatigue. Its no wonder that they are abused for power-study sessions and all-nighters.
However, many students fail to realize that:
These “study drugs” can be compared to steroids used by athletes. They may produce great results in the short-term but are by no means sustainable.
In a society that is fixated on maximum achievement and productivity, how are students expected to keep up?
Medical Director Brian Quigley puts it best:
]]>“By avoiding these drugs you’re going to be the winner in the long run. If all you care about in life is getting a certain grade on a test and doing it at any cost, you might temporarily win, but over the long haul it’s not going to benefit you.”
‘Tis the season of final exams…
And the season of those ever-anticipated final grades.
With students’ rising anxieties over their GPAs, a welcome gift has appeared in this year’s Christmas stockings: grade inflation.
Now we here at USDemocrazy are students, and we too enjoy getting the gift of good grades.
But should we be happy if our top grades are being awarded for substandard work?
Recently, a Harvard professor spoke out against his institution’s tendency to hand out As. Harvard College, one of two schools within Harvard University, hands out more As than any other grade. At Yale, 62% of their grades in the spring of 2012 were A’s.
Some may argue that Harvard and Yale, being Ivy League schools, are blessed with an abundance of over achieving students? But there is a disturbing trend here…
From 1991 to 2007, American colleges and universities, public and private alike, saw average GPAs jump from 2.93 to 3.11.
Some Ivy Leagues have adopted new grading systems to respond to the rising inflation. Princeton, for example, instructs professors not to award more than 35% of their students with As.
As you study for finals and anxiously await the fate of your final grades, you can guarantee this Harvard grade calculator will be a nice self-esteem boost.
Students argue that they need high grades to remain competitive for graduate schools. But is this worth it when students have to put in less work for a high grade? What do you think?
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The new geolocation function in HTML5 adds the functionality to the browser necessary to detect the user’s location, generate co-ordinates, and return them as values back to the user.
Not only will it work across desktops, but across mobile and tablet devices too — which opens up huge possibilities for web developers looking to create location-based online apps!
In today’s tutorial, you’ll learn how to fetch the latitude and longitude co-ordinates using nothing more than a few lines of HTML and JavaScript. You’ll then learn how to take those co-ordinates and feed them into the Google Maps API to reverse-geocode those values and produce a live in-browser map of your current location, complete with a place marker.
Once you’ve finished the tutorial, I recommend checking out the full Google Maps API documentation to learn about some of the more extensive and exciting features it’s capable of.
Have you used a location service for a project? How reliable do you think geolocation is? Let us know in the comments.
Featured image/thumbnail, location image via Shutterstock.
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Today W3C launched a new Data Activity to lead the Web to a new level of data interoperability. The Activity includes two new groups:
The Data Activity subsumes and expands upon the work done in the Semantic Web and eGovernment Activities. W3C will continue to complete and enhance the Semantic Web in the light of growing real-world experience and demands.
Learn more about the Data Activity.
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