The importance of context was brought jarringly to my attention the other day. This week was my intern’s last week, and as such he needed to fill out a “self evaluation” for HR. The first part of the eval was a simple 5-column table: various categories for evaluation, 3 boxes for “Did Not Meet”, “Met”, or “Exceeded” expectations, and finally a box for comments. I personally think that’s a pretty hideous way to do a self evaluation, but I’ll ignore that for now. (I’d give myself a “Did Not Meet” for this post!)

My intern, being a pretty humble guy, put an “X” in each “Met” column and left no comments for himself, unsure of what to put. It looked something like this:

So I decided to “help him out” and provide some feedback since I think he did a very good job this summer. I made my edits and sent it back to him with a note saying we’d review it together the next day.

At our daily standup the next morning he looked pretty depressed and dejected, which I noted, but didn’t think too much about. He sheepishly slipped into my office later that morning for our meeting, and only after we started talking did we realize that something was amiss. You see, I’m a native English-speaker who has spent my entire life in North America. As such, I have learned to read and process information from left to right. When I think about data, I put the lower value on the left and the higher on the right: lower < higher.

Unfortunately, while filling out the review I had skimmed the table and just started editing. So what my intern received from me looked like this:

After my intern started breathing again, we had a good laugh about it. Well, I apologized and laughed and he laughed with relief in the “just got a last-minute pardon” kind of way.
There are two lessons here:

1. Don’t make assumptions. (I should’ve read the document more thoroughly.)
2. Understand your user’s context. Present information in a way that flows with how they naturally think.

1. San Francisco Catering Says:
   October 10th, 2009 at 2:20 pm

   I remember doing self-evaluations and I despised them. I think most people do not write any commons because they are afraid to realize what they did wrong. I have gone through this many times especially when I was in school. Now I have my own business of catering in San Francisco and I do evaluate my employees, just not this way.