Yolinda van der Linde

A partner and the Managing Member of iWits, located in Windhoek Namibia – I would say my core profession is Web Development; however I absolutely love User Experience and behaviour and would like share my ideas around these as well.

[w3yoli]

Be careful what you post online… it might come back to haunt you!

I see so many people post photos' of their children or drunken evenings and for some reason can never find the right words to tell them why they should not do so... well here it is, the real reason why you should "think before you ink (or hit submit)"

http://www.iwits.me/blog/blog_entry.php?blogID=39

[w3yoli]

R.I.P. Orkut

The world is sad to say goodbye to Orkut, it has been a good 10 years of posting, commenting and connecting with friends – and now it’s all gone.

It seems that Google has announced the end of Orkut, but at the same time they did say that they are going to focus their energy and resources on other products YouTube, Google Plus, and Blogger. This I think is even better news. Personally I am a fan of YouTube (as we all are) and don’t mind the other products as much, but I truly cannot wait to see what Google has in store for us next!

Before we get ahead of ourselves… read more about Orkut on the blog post on iWits called: R.I.P Orkut [24-01-2004 to 30-10-2014]

[w3yoli]

There is no such thing as a stupid / simple question

A bold statement to make - by reading that sentence all of you thought of at least 5 “stupid questions” you received within the past few days.Working in the web development industry we receive more than usual “stupid questions” or at least that’s how we see them.

When a client asks one of those questions we share it amongst ourselves and snicker, because how could someone ask something like that! How dare they? We receive questions like:

“Why can’t you change the layout of my Facebook page?”

 “What is a browser?”

 “Why can’t I access Google?”

 “What is a USB?”

 “What does a domain name mean, and why do I need it?”

 “I pay a lot for internet access, why can’t I host my site on there?”

And to those in the industry this is standard knowledge, because we’ve done the research and found out what it means and how it works.

Even with all of the questions I receive on a daily basis I still believe there is no such thing as a stupid, it is a different story if the same question is asked by the same person several times but it’s not the question that’s stupid or even the person it might be more than that – so how would we know?

A recent study was done in America to find out what percentage of the general public understand basic technology terms, and the results were shocking but definitely an eye opener! 2,392 Americans where given a list of terms and asked what they thought it meant, they were not aware that it was related to technology – below are the results.

11 % say they believe HTML is a STD;

 77 % could not identify what SEO means;

 27 % identified “gigabyte” as a commonly found insect in South America;

 42 % said they believe a “motherboard” was “the deck of a cruise ship”;

23 % thought MP3 was a “Star Wars” robot;

18 % identified “Blue Ray” as a marine animal;

15 % believed “Software” was comfortable clothing; and

12 % believed USB was an acronym for a European country.

I was shocked when I read the results, but not because I thought it was stupid just more that there are so many people who have never before worked with technology, in today’s day and age how can it be possible? But sadly it is and even more so than we know!

Below are 2 situations where people have either never interacted with things that we think is basic “necessity” and the final example gives you a clear indication that without questions there will be no growth.

Example 1: The Gods must be crazy

“The Gods must be crazy is a 1980 South African comedy film written and directed by Jamie Uys. Set in Botswana, it tells a story of Xi, a Sho of the Kalahari Desert whose tribe has no knowledge of the world beyond. “- Wikipedia 

A childhood classic to several, this movie made me cry of laughter when I was younger, thinking how this could be possible – we assume that everyone knows what Coke-Cola is.  

The movie depicted a tribe’s reactions to their first interaction with a simple thing like a Coke-Cola bottle and how they searched for a use for this item. We laughed while sitting with a Coke-Cola in the hand, but what did we ask the first time we saw a Coke-Cola bottle? The main difference most of us were still young and cannot recall ever asking the question in the first place, but someone taught us how to drink from a bottle and introduced us to soft drinks.

Example 2: God Grew Tired of Us

“God Grew Tired of Us is a 2006 documentary film about three of the “Lost Boys of Sudan”, a group of some 25,000 young men who have fled the wars in Sudan since the 1980s, and their experience as they move to the United States.”-Wikipedia

What an amazing documentary – this obviously did not make me laugh but rather shocked me to the core. Besides the harsh reality of the documentary it was quite clear that there are thousands if not millions of people on the planet today that still live in primitive lives, and that have no idea what the average (according to us) thing is and how to use it.

These boys did not know what basic things where like a light, fridge, super market, or even a toilet. Their reaction the first time they walked into a supermarket was shocking, because they did not feel their questions were stupid on the contrary they needed to ask the questions to learn about the items.

Most of us live in protected environments, but there are thousands that do not have this luxury – so when someone asks you something simple why do you have the right to think that it is a stupid question? How do you know what the persons living standards and circumstances are, or even if they have had the opportunity to interact with the item they are asking about.

Example 3: How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries

“Adam Savage walks through two spectacular examples of profound scientific discoveries that came from simple, creative methods anyone could have followed -- Eratosthenes' calculation of the Earth's circumference around 200 BC and Hippolyte Fizeau's measurement of the speed of light in 1849.”

The last TEDTalk is the perfect example to depict that without simple or stupid questions the most life changing discoveries would never have existed.

So we all snicker at these “stupid” questions just because we know what the answer is, but what if the person asking the question wanted to learn something in the first place – by laughing all you are doing is demotivating them from asking again and learning.

If feel that more people should ask questions, even the big suits in CEO positions. There are so many of us out there that don’t want to seem stupid so never ask anything and in a nutshell never learning anything, just because you are afraid of what others might think of you.

A wise man once told me ask questions; rather remain stupid for 5 minutes than the rest of your life.