I think you should go with Vaniver’s idea. (Edit: Vaniver now has multiple ideas up. I mean the one about giving orders to malicious idiots. Completely off-topic: that’s also a useful way to explain tasks to people with Asperger’s Syndrome or other neurological oddities that cause executive dysfunction.)
I also think this reminds me of something (fiction) writers talk about a lot: they’ve hit on the way people won’t sympathize with “a billion people died/starved/were tortured/experienced dust specks in their eyes” but will sympathize with “Alice was mobbed by dust specks and blinded” and will sympathize even better if you give some specific details about how it felt. And then they go on to talk about how to make Alice someone the reader cares about and how to craft sentences and other stuff that’s relevant to them but irrelevant here.
But maybe something like making up a character and talking someone through xyr experience using the product step by step, in the kind of detail a novelist would use to describe the climactic fight scene.
Another idea that occurred to me is some sort of exercise where two people would pair up. One would have to do a novel task or navigate some kind of obstacle course blindfolded and the other would have to give directions. They wouldn’t be able to get away with “turn right at the statue” but would instead have to give directions like “turn right at the big smooth stone thing” and… I guess if you were doing something like that, you’d want to give the non-blindfolded partner a picture or map and NOT let them see the one doing the actual task. Otherwise they’d just be able to say “okay, turn right now… turn left… turn left again...” and that would defeat the purpose.
Yeah, seconding the “blind obstacle course” exercise, although you don’t usually need to make it more difficult by not letting the person giving instructions watch (mostly because it’s difficult just to walk in a straight line without visual cues, let alone execute precise turns). It’s a common leadership/working as a group game and people usually need to watch other attempts go wrong 3 or 4 times before hitting a useful level of specificity.
(Summary: Orienteering with the navigation and movement separate. This exercise requires both people to be specific to not get lost, and it can be extended by adding in a race aspect (trying to be specific under pressure!).)
The last paragraph made me think of “MoboGoGlobo”, which is an orienteering event where there are two participants: one doing the navigation who guides the other via phone.
(I’m not sure how familiar with orienteering many people are, so I’ll give a quick intro)
When participating in an orienteering event one normally has to visit a series of markers in a predefined order as quickly as possible (or not, if one isn’t feeling like racing, entirely up to the participant). One has a detailed map (although, importantly, it rarely has street names) that indicates the location of these and the order to visit them in, e.g. the two maps here (the pink (or purple) triangle is the start location and the numbered circles are the markers).
When competing, one uses all sorts of clues to make sure one is going in the right direction and one isn’t lost (and to become unlost), like most obviously the shape of nearby buildings, the topography (e.g. a steep hill), a fork in a track or stream, or more subtly things, like a bend in a track or the position of a power line on the next hill. (Conventionally, one also has a compass, which one uses to orient oneself correctly.)
In this exercise you need two people: one with the map (“navigator”), the other actually on the territory that corresponds to the map (“runner”, this doesn’t imply that one needs to run though): it requires the navigator to describe exactly where to go (“go past the building” < “go to the left of the building that has a round canopy outside”), and also for the runner to describe what they see so that the navigator can keep track (“There is a line of trees” < “A line of trees starts just to my left and goes directly away”).
There are multiple levels of specificity too: the best teams will have a navigator who gives a good general overview of the location of the marker but also detailed instructions along the way, and the runner who gives compact but detailed progress updates (There is limited bandwidth too).
I’m sure many people won’t have done any orienteering before, so this would have to be kept simple. Even just a reasonably large building and using its floor plan as a map, maybe adding some details, and removing any names of rooms (preferably neither participant would have been in the building before). (Other possible locations include parks and university campuses (these can be very complicated though!))
Doing it as a competition adds an element of pressure which is possibly too much for people who are unpracticed at the skill (and at reading a map), but it would be an easy way to extend the exercise and test the skill more.
I think you should go with Vaniver’s idea. (Edit: Vaniver now has multiple ideas up. I mean the one about giving orders to malicious idiots. Completely off-topic: that’s also a useful way to explain tasks to people with Asperger’s Syndrome or other neurological oddities that cause executive dysfunction.)
I also think this reminds me of something (fiction) writers talk about a lot: they’ve hit on the way people won’t sympathize with “a billion people died/starved/were tortured/experienced dust specks in their eyes” but will sympathize with “Alice was mobbed by dust specks and blinded” and will sympathize even better if you give some specific details about how it felt. And then they go on to talk about how to make Alice someone the reader cares about and how to craft sentences and other stuff that’s relevant to them but irrelevant here.
But maybe something like making up a character and talking someone through xyr experience using the product step by step, in the kind of detail a novelist would use to describe the climactic fight scene.
Another idea that occurred to me is some sort of exercise where two people would pair up. One would have to do a novel task or navigate some kind of obstacle course blindfolded and the other would have to give directions. They wouldn’t be able to get away with “turn right at the statue” but would instead have to give directions like “turn right at the big smooth stone thing” and… I guess if you were doing something like that, you’d want to give the non-blindfolded partner a picture or map and NOT let them see the one doing the actual task. Otherwise they’d just be able to say “okay, turn right now… turn left… turn left again...” and that would defeat the purpose.
Upvoted for that last paragraph.
Yeah, seconding the “blind obstacle course” exercise, although you don’t usually need to make it more difficult by not letting the person giving instructions watch (mostly because it’s difficult just to walk in a straight line without visual cues, let alone execute precise turns). It’s a common leadership/working as a group game and people usually need to watch other attempts go wrong 3 or 4 times before hitting a useful level of specificity.
(Summary: Orienteering with the navigation and movement separate. This exercise requires both people to be specific to not get lost, and it can be extended by adding in a race aspect (trying to be specific under pressure!).)
The last paragraph made me think of “MoboGoGlobo”, which is an orienteering event where there are two participants: one doing the navigation who guides the other via phone.
(I’m not sure how familiar with orienteering many people are, so I’ll give a quick intro) When participating in an orienteering event one normally has to visit a series of markers in a predefined order as quickly as possible (or not, if one isn’t feeling like racing, entirely up to the participant). One has a detailed map (although, importantly, it rarely has street names) that indicates the location of these and the order to visit them in, e.g. the two maps here (the pink (or purple) triangle is the start location and the numbered circles are the markers).
When competing, one uses all sorts of clues to make sure one is going in the right direction and one isn’t lost (and to become unlost), like most obviously the shape of nearby buildings, the topography (e.g. a steep hill), a fork in a track or stream, or more subtly things, like a bend in a track or the position of a power line on the next hill. (Conventionally, one also has a compass, which one uses to orient oneself correctly.)
In this exercise you need two people: one with the map (“navigator”), the other actually on the territory that corresponds to the map (“runner”, this doesn’t imply that one needs to run though): it requires the navigator to describe exactly where to go (“go past the building” < “go to the left of the building that has a round canopy outside”), and also for the runner to describe what they see so that the navigator can keep track (“There is a line of trees” < “A line of trees starts just to my left and goes directly away”).
There are multiple levels of specificity too: the best teams will have a navigator who gives a good general overview of the location of the marker but also detailed instructions along the way, and the runner who gives compact but detailed progress updates (There is limited bandwidth too).
I’m sure many people won’t have done any orienteering before, so this would have to be kept simple. Even just a reasonably large building and using its floor plan as a map, maybe adding some details, and removing any names of rooms (preferably neither participant would have been in the building before). (Other possible locations include parks and university campuses (these can be very complicated though!))
Doing it as a competition adds an element of pressure which is possibly too much for people who are unpracticed at the skill (and at reading a map), but it would be an easy way to extend the exercise and test the skill more.
I typically use a permalink to refer to comments that aren’t upthread. (Thanks for the recommendation, by the way!)