How To Confuse Women

How to confuse women

• Step 1 centre the text in a cell
• Step 2 watch the confusion

Alright, it’s a somewhat clickbaity title, but I did cause a lot of confusion to one person with one simple feature, and she still didn’t understand when I felt I had perfectly explained it.

I had made a grid which shows a person’s name, alongside a list of items they have ordered, in alphabetical order; as per the requirements.

Later on, we would add alternating row colours to make different people’s orders more distinctive. In the example I came up with, there were only 2 orders on a page, and I had left the row selection highlight on, so it actually looked like we did have alternating colours.

The examples from the UX team only had a few items per person, so it wasn’t clear how they had aligned the text. I left it centred which looked a bit weird for large orders, which is the example I came up with.

Person	Items
Lisa	phone
	CD
	hat
	lamp
James	phone
	shorts
	t-shirt
	towel

 Just to show my progress on this new project, I posted a screenshot to generate a bit of hype 😉

Olivia was confused about why it wasn’t in alphabetical order – but it is in alphabetical order!

Olivia: why is “phone” at the top?
 
Me: Ulrika's designs or my screenshot? Mine is alphabetical. Phone is for a different Person. We still need to add the alternating colours, and maybe don't centre the name to make it clearer
 
Olivia: this one <sends screenshot of top row>
 
Me: Different Person
  
Olivia: I'm confused. Lisa's name is the same row as Phone
 
Me: There's 2 People there. Just that the second person has loads of items, and because we have centred the Person name, it's halfway down the row. We can use alternate row colours as Ulrika’s design, and we can stop centering the name to make it clear.

I message Tim:

Me: I can't believe the confusion that has arisen even though I have explained what it is.
 
Tim: I got your back

<Back in the main chat>

Tim: Phone is for Lisa there
 
Tim: Everything else is for James
 
Tim: Which is when the alphabetical order kicks in.
 
Olivia: Thank you Tim, That was seriously messing with my mind. The name needs to be at the start of the list of items.

<Back to private message with Tim>

Me: I cannot understand why my explanation wasn't good enough. Is it because I am a developer nerd and cannot communicate with people?
 
Tim <jestingly>: the trick is to keep your answers on one line. Colours and shapes help too.
 

I’m so baffled. Why couldn’t they understand what I wrote? I wrote a perfect explanation then Tim just put his explanation in short messages, and he was thanked for his explanation. It’s like I don’t exist!