Such a privilege

Transcript

You found it. This is Higher Ed Hot Takes. And I'm Joel Goodman. Have you listened to any of the previous episodes? If not, welcome. I'm glad you're here. Sign up for emails at higher ed Hot takes.com if you're back for more. Well, today's topic builds on what I've been talking about since episode one, so let's start here.

Whether you're thinking about personalization or integrating AI into your workflows, or maybe worrying that you've been adding to the slot pile and making your job irrelevant at the same time, you know, whatever it is. I want to help you reframe your thinking.

All these things come down to user experience and service design.

Whenever I take on a web project, here's where I don't start. Design. I don't start with design or content or inspiration or features or any of that stuff, but a lot of RFPs in higher ed do start with those things. They like this or that from the college down the street, or they wanna make sure that the website is AI ready, whatever that means.

I know other agencies also ask for references of questions like what websites do you like as if copying someone is going to produce better work?

No, we have to stop thinking like that. Like unless your goal is to soothe a VP's or president's ego, the only right and reasonable place to start is with the real people who interact with your website.

And you know what? We live in a world where more and more real people are being disenfranchised over political power aspirations every day. sounds like an opportunity to make a difference in their lives and to your bottom line at the same time.

But what does it mean to start with real people?

There are a lot of different ways to go about it, but baseline, there's a ton of psychology work to draw on and most of it's gonna show you that the people that visit your website don't like your dumb chatbots and ignore your drone videos.

Add to that psychology foundation, real world usability studies, and it starts to get more precise. You discover that your audience thinks less in terms of file folders and strict information architecture than they do in taxonomy and results

Sidebar here, like, honestly, the fact that in the 2020s there are still university websites using org chart IAs and navigation models created more than 20 years ago is just baffling to me. Try changing it from the inside like I've been for the past 18 years, and you'll figure out what else is wrong with this industry, but I digress.

Real people. What that means is you can't start with what you think is cool or what's common across this sector and expect to get results. You have to do the research and that doesn't mean asking ChatGPT.

This is what I've been yammering on about all these past few months. Other people's data and practice rarely works for your own without substantial tweaking.

I don't know how many different ways I can say this, but LLMs are built on other people's data, practice, content, and writing. Their output is the lowest common denominator of what everyone else does. It's generic reproduced mediocrity.

Using ChatGPT exclusively for your research takes a human element out of the equation. You'll never be speaking to your audience because LLMs don't know who your audience is.

This is a problem, and this is my core frustration with AI hype. Our industry is so overworked, run down, and burnt out, that it willingly trades its core identity for tricks. Does that sound like anything else?

Folks, this is how Fascism roots its way into our thinking. When slop is good enough for us, we have no reason to be creative anymore. When we lose creativity, we stop thinking deeply and critically, and when we stop being critical of what's going on, we allow ourselves to be subjugated.

I'm not trying to be alarmist, but this alarms me. When I hear friends who have been proponents of environmental protection turn into apologists for AI, trying to refute the evidence with poorly researched and sourced internet content. I break a little bit inside.

We don't have to do this. The owners of these companies have more than enough money, that they're not actually using to enrich the world. They don't need our help getting more subscribers.

And when I see institutions paying upwards of a hundred thousand dollars a year for a website plugin that provides questionable return on investment, and by the way is being used by a load of their peers, rather than fixing their website's core issues, I just shake my head.

Like my platform apparently isn't big enough to make an impact in their thinking, but you know, I appreciate those of you who have stuck with me because of this sort of truth revealing.

Friends, again, this is about a disconnection with what makes us human. I said it in the last episode and I'll probably keep saying it. We have to stop outsourcing our vitality to machines.

We're surrounded by humans with experiences, opinions, and deep knowledge, at least for now, and it's our responsibility to use that, not replace face-to-face time with typing into a chat box, asking an algorithm questions. Start with people. Ask about them and their needs and their questions.

Use this insight to craft great experiences for them. Create a connection with them. Don't ask a large language model to do it for you. That's lazy and disrespectful. It, it indicates you've given up and that you don't care about what you're supposedly doing professionally.

I was watching an episode of Top Chef where the finalists were teamed up with Olympians and Paralympians to complete their cooking challenge, and at the end, after winning the challenge, one of the chefs said, they asked their partner how they stayed motivated when they'd won so many medals. And the Olympian responded, it's a privilege to compete.

For me, that's the motivation. It's a privilege to exist and to have creative thought, to be a human being and to be able to express that openly. Remembering that privilege and leaning into it is how we remember, we do this work for other people, other humans who may need, reminding that it's a privilege to be where they are too, and that that means they can make a difference in their own way.

Every day. All your work. Is it for the real people that it affects? It's a privilege you have, but it's also one that you can easily lose in the distractions. I'm Joel Goodman. You can find me on Blue Sky or LinkedIn or visit higheredhottakes.com to send me an email.