You are techY podcast

[00:00:00] Ellen: You are listening to the You Are Techy Podcast, episode number 169.

[00:00:04] Narrator: Welcome to the You Are TechY podcast, where it’s all about growing in your tech so you can find the tech job of your dreams. And now your host technology learning coach Ellen Twomey 

[00:00:24] Ellen: Welcome to the show. Today we’re talking about chunking a little bit of tech, and the term chunking is a learning term from the field of learning sciences that George Miller first crafted the 1950s. And you might have heard the magical number seven plus or minus two, or it talks about some of the limits on our capacity.

For processing information. So like how do we group information? But that was just kind of the fundamental, point of it and that that is why we have, phone numbers that are seven digits and, but hey, what do you know if you add a three digit area code? And that’s a separate chunk. People can hold 10 digits in their brain.

And, so that’s fundamentally where the term chunking comes from. But learning sciences expanded this concept. Shout out to my folks in the learning design and technology department at Purdue Boiler up, um, for teaching me this concept. But essentially, chunking really has to do with studying and learning a very small piece of information.

At a time, and then even repeatedly over time. And so this is, it sounds kind of simple, kind of straightforward. Oh, okay. Just learn a little bit. But essentially that is. A major challenge in technology is that we normally, commonly, often, most people, most of the time make the problems in technology too big.

And the reason that that we do that is because it’s very easy to do that and to make a problem, a small chunk in technology. Is very difficult because there are all these co-dependencies that we think, well, if I don’t know how to write JavaScript, how can I possibly learn, react? And if I don’t know how to make a for loop, then how can I be able to proceed forward?

And then, okay, once I learn how to do it in this context, what if I need to do another context? Or I have this great idea for UX design, but I don’t know how to do Figma and oh, I wanna do Figma, but now it’s not looking the way I want and I need to learn all these little nuances. And there are just all these co-dependencies that happen.

And any one change can affect all of them. So it really is worth talking about this concept of a little bit of tech again and again, because regardless of whether we’re learning tech or we’re trying to, just solve a new problem in tech. So, just a quick aside, and this is fundamental to how, we do the tech e coaching membership, is we do it based on projects.

We don’t say, here, learn this one way that we design, learn this one way that we develop and just repeat that. Instead, what we say is, here’s a real world project, and we walk you through how to come up with that and then find. I’m a freelance client because every project in technology has its own nuances.

they’re rarely, like the exact same thing, even if they’re similar, in lots of ways, they’re rarely the exact same thing. And so whether you’re learning or just in tech, solving a new problem, creating a new software, Adding a new feature to the software, redesigning a website, any of those are going to still be really big things that require chunking and breaking it down, whether it’s to learn or to do, and it gets very murky in technology.

which one of those it is. And so the more you learn, then you can transition into doing and, and less learning. But essentially there’s, there’s usually a piece that’s still learning or, at least rein informing yourself of how you’ve done things in the past. So all that to say that this concept of chunking a little bit of tech is tricky because.

Really in technology, software development and software design. the right strategy is to zoom in and then zoom out. And so at a high level, you are going to want to look across and see, oh, what are some reusable components or what’s part of the design experience that I already know that I wanna expand on?

You want, you wanna look at it from this bird’s eye view. At a high level, and then you want to zoom in to the chunking and the small level. So I actually did a podcast episode on this concept of zooming in and zooming out. Um, that’s episode 1 49. So check that out if you wanna learn more about that concept.

But I think it is worth noting that you can’t stay fixed. On this little bit, of a problem, the entire time you’re gonna be zooming in and zooming out. But when you zoom in, the real question is, have you made it small enough to make it solvable, to make it implementable, to make it designable? And typically that answer is no.

Typically, we haven’t made it quite small enough. We feel like it’s almost, um, embarrassing. It shouldn’t have to be this small. We should be able to hold more in our brains. so I bring you back to the chunking concept by Jor Miller that we can hold about seven numbers plus or minus two in our brains.

so my advice there, my recommendation there is when you are feeling. Like you’re not capable of solving it or, or you don’t know where to go. Try to make it just a little bit smaller and that will really help you, to maybe, solve it yourself. Find the resource that you need to support you through it.

find the help that you need to guide you through the solution or maybe find the right person to outsource it to. But when you make it really big, it’s very complicated to. and frequently impossible to solve it. And so you’re making it a problem that is not solvable, right? So you wanna just keep making it smaller.

And what I’d like to do is just give you a few examples of how this can play out in specific tech projects. So for ux, a small chunk that may even require further chunking is the menu. so your menu on. a web app or on an app, and you are trying to figure out, first of all, you zoom out and you say, okay, well, holistically what are we trying to accomplish?

What are the most important things for the users to have access to, in order to navigate our system in a way that represents what we’re doing here and what are the most powerful features, in frequent features, So that’s kind of the zoom out. But then you’re gonna zoom in and say, okay, well what about this one feature and what about this one feature?

And when you zoom into each individual feature, a great question to ask. More important than, do we have everything we need? Have we covered it? Is what can we strip away? so the menu itself is going to require deep thinking to have awesome ux, but it’s also just a little bit of tech. Right. It’s just a little bit, there’s just a few words or a few icons, or it should be, shouldn’t be so many, please enough, with the sub menus.

Okay. Just a few sub menus, not hundreds. and so, That, that little bit of tech requires a lot of thinking, so don’t, skip over that, especially the menu. Don’t skip over how much thought that requires. And while it’s a, fairly solvable problem, it’s also very easy to get it wrong. It’s really easy to get a menu wrong and to put too much in there and confuse your user and.

put the wrong things there and not, what you’re trying to drive them to. Remember, making decisions for your user, telling them what to do is a great thing, and probably why I love UX so much. Just love telling people what to do. But if you don’t, in an app, if you aren’t decisive and you don’t tell people, Hey, this is exactly.

what you’re supposed to do here. Then they’re confused. It’s not kind to be indecisive. it’s actually unkind and confusing. It makes for poor ux. All right. Another example of chunking a little bit of tech is, What if you’re building a new software, totally new software from scratch and this is a software that’s gonna help, let’s say it’s an app that helps users easily manage their money.

I’m a little bit obsessed with this concept I think I have like four. F like FinTech, personal finance apps on my phone. And I don’t like any of them. And so I, and um, they’re free. So that’s probably, I should probably pay a little more, but I don’t really like any of them the way that they’re working and the way that they’re working for me.

And so I’m, anyway, playing around with that concept. but the first thing you’re gonna need in a personal finance app is, A way for the users to get their financial data into the app, right? An easy way for them to do that. And so, That’s a little bit of tech, but that requires big thinking in terms of both design and development.

how many bank accounts do they have and do we want them to have their cars, their houses, their credit cards? do we want all the financial assets? how many bank accounts do we allow? how easily can we get that data? So, There is quite a bit of tech, even in that little bit of how do users get their financial data into the app so that that little bit probably even needs more.

going into more detail. You’ll have to think through each and every one for both design and development. And so, so that’s probably why the app suck. Cause cause it’s hard and there’s, there’s a lot to it. but again, just think about that, not even talking about viewing expenses in income over time and categories.

And not even going into all that. Just getting the data in there is, is actually, I would say not, not even a little bit. So how can we get the users financial data from bank number one? That would be a little bit, and that’d be, specific enough. All right. let’s look at one more.

So let’s say that you’re a non-technical founder and you’re founding a tech startup. How would you go about getting your product into market? So that’s a big tech problem, right? That’s a really common, hard, big thing to talk about. How do we make that a little bit? Well, actually the first little bit is that the tech gods and goddesses of the past, there are tech gurus, who’ve gone before us have actually.

Thought of this concept and called it an mvp, a minimum viable product, right? And so that’s our first little bit of tech. what is the smallest. Piece, the smallest feature you can launch and still have an app that represents where you’re going and, trying to see if users actually want to use that.

So it’s interesting that this concept of a little bit of tech is actually embedded into tech with MVPs. And so, think about how important that concept of making things smaller of chunking things is because chunking is really. the beginning of the answer to many and maybe even most tech problems that are out there.

It’s, it’s usually, hey, we’re all just making it, too big. and so, If you personally are out there struggling with a roadblock right now, I want you to ask yourself this question and see if it doesn’t help you again on that one specific problem. Try to nail down that one specific problem and say to yourself, how can I make this problem smaller?

How can I make it more manageable and clearly defined? How can I make it? Just a little bit of tech now. I want you to try to answer that and see if chunking doesn’t get you on your way, in and out of that roadblock and on to mastery. Thank you so much for joining me on this week’s episode of the podcast.

Big shout out to share your genius, our new podcast editors. Check out Cherry Genius. Appreciate it.Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to sign up for the are techY email list. Imagine being in the tech job of your dreams. Join me to get the strategies, training, and never ending support. To get hired, sign up at youaretechy.com. That’s Y O U A R E T E C H Y.com. I’ll see you next time.