Raising a Glass to Personal Progress
October 20, 2023
What I'm Listening To
'Bring back the fever again…'
Story From The Week
Recently I gave a presentation that I’ve been preparing for weeks about the UX Design process. During the hours and days I haven’t had feature work, I’ve been focusing on professional development by learning more about UX Design. And even after the hours I spent watching courses, playing around in Figma, writing notes, and preparing Google slides, on Friday morning, I still felt like, “WHO am I to be giving this presentation?” I invited everyone in my company (there are only fifteen of us…) with the idea to give a “lunch & learn” style presentation.
My stomach was in knots for the hours leading up to lunchtime, but honestly — it went FINE. Good, even! I hit all of my points, and it seemed like the few people who were in the Zoom room really enjoyed it.
I couldn’t help but wonder though… was it even helpful? Was the content I shared valuable to those who heard it? Did I do all of this preparing and worrying for nothing? The doubts and insecurities slowly but surely crept into my brain in the hours after the presentation.
This morning, however, in our weekly team meeting, a coworker who attended my presentation raved about it to the rest of the team. She recommended that everyone watch the recording, because of how helpful it would be to them in understanding our design process. I could hardly believe my ears. I felt so thankful and reassured in that moment. I’m usually not deeply affected by others’ words of encouragement. My motivation is more internal than external. But I felt so empowered this morning, and I’m proud of myself for doing a hard thing: learning a new topic, teaching others about it, and believing I have something valuable to offer (even if I don’t feel that way at all times).
I rarely take the time to celebrate my accomplishments, but today I am. Way to go, me!
What Did I Learn?
I’ve been using i.e. wrong for my entire life.
As I was creating a User Persona template for the aforementioned presentation, I wondered… “Are there periods between the ‘i’ and ‘e’ of i.e.?” Turns out, yes — there are. But what I really wanted to use before my list of examples was e.g.!
e.g. is short for exempli gratia, a Latin phrase that means “for the sake of example.” It’s used to introduce one or more examples.
i.e., on the other hand, is short for id est, which translates to English as “that is to say” or “in other words.” It’s used to clarify something by saying it another way.
Apologies to all of my former English professors for this mishap, i.e., my reluctance to look up the correct usage until now.
What Made Me Confused...
Earlier this week, I was reading a book called Lean UX after work. I decided to open the Notes app on my iPhone to dictate notes from what I was reading. Surprisingly, my focus was unwavering, even at 6 pm. I turned page after page, speaking into my phone as fast as I could while occasionally fixing small spelling and grammar mistakes along the way (my phone has a knack for inserting commas in places they don’t belong).
After several chapters, I took a break to review my notes and address the comma conundrum. However, in a moment of sheer carelessness, I accidentally selected all the text in my note. In the blink of an eye, it all vanished. I stared at my phone in disbelief for several seconds.
I frantically swiped my finger across the screen. Maybe I didn’t erase all of the text? Maybe I just scrolled down really fast? Nope.
I double-tapped the screen to see if there was an undo option. Nope.
I exited the note to see if maybe an older draft had been saved. Nope.
I looked in my deleted notes, hoping that maybe it would be there. Nope.
I finally turned to Google for answers on how to recover my hours' worth of hard note-taking. I unfortunately discovered hundreds of posts on Apple forums filled with people lamenting the exact same issue. Worse still, there was no resolution. My notes were gone forever.
I know I am totally inept when it comes to using my iPhone, but it should be a lot more difficult for fat-fingered people like me to select and delete all text within a note in one foul swoop!