01:09 - Jenna’s Superpower: Being Super Human: Deeply rooted in what is human in tech

• The User is Everything

04:30 - Keeping Focus on the User

• Building For Themself


• Bother(!!) Users


• Walking A Mile In Your Users Shoes - Jamey Hampton

09:09 - Interviewing Users (Testing)

• Preparation


• Identifying Bias


• Getting Things Wrong


• Gamifying/Winning (Developer Dogs & Testing Cats)


• Overtesting

23:15 - Working With ADHD

• Alerts & Alarms


• Medication


• Underdiagnosis / Misdiagnosis


• Presentation


• Medical Misogyny and Socialization


• Masking


• Finding a Good Clinician

Reflections:

John: Being a super human.

Jacob: Forgetting how to mask.

Jamey: Talking about topics that are Greater Than Code.

Jenna: Talking about what feels stream-of-consciousness. Having human spaces is important. Support your testers!

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Transcript:

JAMEY: Hi, everyone and thanks for tuning in to Episode 276 of Greater Than Code. I’m one of your hosts, Jamey Hampton, and I'm here with my friend, Jacob Stoebel.

JACOB: Hello, like to be here. I'm with my friend, John Sawers.

JOHN: Thanks, Jacob. And I'm here with our guest, Jenna Charlton.

Jenna is a software tester and product owner with over a decade of experience. They've spoken at a number of dev and test conferences and is passionate about risk-based testing, building community within agile teams, developing the next generation of testers, and accessibility. When not testing, Jenna loves to go to punk rock shows and live pro wrestling events with their husband Bob, traveling, and cats. Their favorite of which are the two that share their home, Maka and Excalipurr.

Welcome to the show, Jenna! [chuckles]

JENNA: Hi, everybody! I'm excited to be here with all the J’s.

[laughter]

JAMEY: We're so excited to have you.

JOHN: And we will start with the question we always start with, which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

JENNA: On a less serious note, I have a couple of superpowers. One I discovered when I was a teenager. I can find Legally Blonde on TV [laughter] any kind of day [laughs] somewhere. It's a less valuable superpower than it used to be. But boy, was it a great superpower when you would be scrolling and I'm like, “Legally Blonde, I found it!”

[laughter]

JAMEY: I was going to ask if one of your superpowers was cat naming, because Excalipurr is very good. It's very good. [laughs]

JENNA: I wish I could take credit for that.

[laughter]

Bob is definitely the one responsible.

JAMEY: So it's your husband superpower, cat naming and yours is Legally Blonde. Got it.

JENNA: Mine is Legally Blonde.

[laughter]

I also can find a way to relate anything to pro wrestling.

JAMEY: I've seen that one in action, actually. Yes.

[laughter]

JENNA: But no, my real superpower, or at least as far as tech goes is that I am super human. Not in that I am a supremely powerful human, it's that I am deeply rooted in what is human in tech and that's what matters to me and the user is my everything.

I'm not one of those people who nerds out about the latest advancement. Although, I enjoy talking about it. What I care about, what gets me excited, and gets me out of bed every day in tech is thinking about how I can solve a deeply human problem in a way that is empathetic, centers the user, and what matters to them.

JAMEY: Do you feel like you were always like that naturally, or do you feel like that was a skill that you fostered over your career?

JENNA: I think it's who I am, but I think I had to learn how to harness it to make it useful. I am one of those people who has the negative trait of empathy and when I say negative trait, there's that tipping point on empathy where it goes from being a powerful, positive thing to being something that invades your life.

So I am one of those people who sitting in a conference room, I can feel the temperature change and it makes me wiggle in my seat, feel uncomfortable, get really awkward, and then default to things like people pleasing, which is a terrible, terrible trait [laughs] that I fight every day against. It's actually why remote work has saved me.

But I've had to learn how to take caring about people and turn it into something that's valuable and useful and delivers because we can talk about the user all day and take no action on it. It's one thing to care about the user and to care about people. It's another thing to understand how to translate that care into something useful. When I learned how to do that in testing, my career changed and then when I learned how to translate that to product, things really started to change.

JAMEY: That's amazing.

JENNA: Thank you. [laughs]

JACOB: I feel like so often at work I sit down at 9:00 AM and I'm like, “Okay, what do our users need in this feature, or how could this potentially go wrong and hurt our users?” And then by 9:20 , everything's off the rails.

[laughter]

As work happens and here's a million fires to put out and it's all about things in the weeds that if I could just get them to work, then I could go back to thinking about to use it. You know what I mean? How do you keep that focus?

JENNA: So part it is, I don't want to say the luck, but is the benefit of where I landed. I work for a company that does AI/ML driven test automation. I design and build experiences for myself. I'm building for what I, as a tester, needed when I was testing and let's be honest, I still test. I just test more from a UAT perspective. I get to build for myself, which means that I understand the need of my user. If I was building something for devs, I wouldn't even know where to begin because that's not my frame of reference.

I feel like we make a mistake when we are designing things that we take for granted that we know what a user's shoes look like, but I know what my user's shoes look like because I filled them. But I don't know what a dev shoes look like. I don't know what an everyday low-tech user shoes look like. I kind of do because I've worked with those users and I always use my grandmother as an example.

She's my frame of reference. She's fairly highly skilled for being 91 years old, but she is 91 years old. She didn't start using computers until 20 years ago and at that point, she was in her 70s. Very, very different starting point. But I have the benefit that that's where I start so I've got to leg up.

But I think when we start to think about how do I build this for someone else and that someone isn't yourself, the best place to start is by going to them and interviewing them. What do you need? Talk to me about what your barriers are right now. Talk to me about what hurts you today. Talk to me about what really works for you today.

I always tell people that one of the most beneficial things I did when I worked for Progressive was that my users were agents. So I could reach out to them and say like, “Hey, I want to see your workflow.” And I could do that because I was an agent, not a customer. They can show me that and it changed the way I would test because now I could test like them.

So I don't have a great answer other than go bother them. Get a user community and go bug the heck out of them all the time. [laughs] Like, what do you mean? How do you do this today? What are your stumbling blocks? How do I remove them for you? Because they've got the answer; they just don't know it.

JAMEY: That was really gratifying for me to listen to actually.

[laughter]

It's not a show about me. It's a show about you. So I don't want to make it about me, but I have a talk called Walking a Mile In Your Users’ Shoes and basically, the takeaway from it is meet them where they are. So when I heard you say that, I was like, “Yes, I totally agree!” [laughs]

JENNA: But I also learned so much from you on this because I don't remember if it's that talk, or a different one, but you did the talk about a user experience mistake, or a development mistake thinking about greenhouses.

JAMEY: Yes. That's the talk I'm talking about. [laughs]

JENNA: Yeah. So I learned so much from you in that talk and I've actually referenced it a number times. Even things when I talk to testers and talk about misunderstandings around the size of a unit and that that may not necessarily be global information. That that was actually siloed to the users and you guys didn't have that and had to create a frame of reference because it was a mess. So I reference that talk all the time. [laughs]

JAMEY: I'm going to cry. There's nothing better to hear than you helped someone learn something.

[laughter]

So I'm so happy. [chuckles]

JENNA: You'r