usability experts are left-brained, designers are right-brained

Well, the actual title was Usability experts are from Mars, graphic designers are from Venus, but I found the feminine connotation of designers from Venus inaccurate: I've had many talented male students who had a very masculine approach to design. So I'd categorize it as left- and right-brained.

While stereotypes are always risky, let's live dangerously for a moment. There seems to be the lack of a math gene in many of my design students, while the art gene is beautifully and abundantly evident. In fact, one of my favorite stories is of my colleague, an incredibly talented teacher and artist named Beth, who is terrified of math and has the worst sense of direction I've ever seen. Beth has a complementary twin: she is an accountant, with no artistic sense whatsoever. Beth is thin with curly hair; she tells me her twin is stout with straight hair. They must have made an amazingly complete duo in utero.

My students are nearly universally dismayed by math and often put it off until the end of their studies, only to reluctantly find they need remedial study before they can get to college-level math and graduate. They are similarly intimidated by HTML and other forms of coding. Once in a while I get a programmer who wants to learn about design, and they are equally wary of the elements of design (line, shape, color, value, texture, space, and form) and principles (balance, unity, harmony, variety, and emphasis).

The piece articulates the tension between design and structure quite nicely. (It's not much of a stretch to correlate math and coding ability with structure.) I am one of those weird people who has both left- and right-brained traits--I've both written code and designed. This may sound like a good thing, but sometimes I feel like a "Jill of all trades, mistress of none." To translate this saying for our Asian classmates, this sort of means that I can do many things, but none of them especially well.

The required reading for this week, Blueprints for the Web: Organization for the Masses, was less enlightening to me. I've been a sorter since I can remember. When I was a kid, I would periodically dump my piggybank or seashell collection (I grew up near the beaches of Southern California) on the floor and sort, sort, sort. To this day it calms me to sort things, whether it's bills, design books, student work, or categories our college's website redesign (I'm on the redesign committee). Course organization has been one of my focuses in the online classes I teach, and I often get feedback that students like the courses specifically for that reason.

Certainly the point in the article is well-taken that it's enlightening to have many different user perspectives on sorting. One person's Grandma's Recipes is another's Summer Berry Pies.