Obviously we do this all the time – with careers as our focus, we tend to define people by their job when we want to present their stories and expertise to students. But when we created an online careers resource for diversity and equal opps and it seemed the first point of interest to users would be the disability/disadvantage/difference – let’s stick with the site’s term “barrier” – that they had to overcome, which suggested classifying and arranging this material by that barrier. Of course that would mean emphasising the barrier over the achievement, defining the person by their barrier not by their work as we do for everyone else, and therein lies the problem.
Blind man or politician?
Putting the barrier first feels so contrary to not only diversity sensitivities, but also the whole message of the site. We want to say that you can move beyond your barriers, that they shouldn’t restrict and determine your career. We want to say that you can choose and build your own identity, that David Blunkett is not “a blind man from a poor background who has done well”, rather that he is a politician first and foremost whose work defines him in just the same way as everyone else.
Our solution so far has been to kind of mix the two together – creating a list of stories with long headings like “Mature Student becomes City Solicitor” so both aspects, barrier and career, are represented. It is not a good solution. It is okay while we still only have a few stories – it is possible to skim the list for words of interest – but it is not very friendly for dyslexic or ADHD users to have to trawl through disorganised long titles, and it will only get rapidly worse.
Another mixed option would be to use tags/keywords and just put a tag cloud on the page so users can select ‘blind’ or ‘politician’ and bring related stories. The trouble is, last time we based retrieval around a tag cloud alone we discovered many users were unfamiliar with this and needed help. We really need this diversity site to be intuitive and easy to use above all, and hierarchical classifications and lists are more familiar.
I wondered what our contributors would think – would they feel irritated at being put in a box labelled ‘deaf’ over everything else, or would they feel ‘being deaf is a key part of my identity and I want to help other deaf students’ so barrier first is fine? I am reading a book About Face at the moment, and it gives descriptions of the experiences of blind people in communicating. The contrast between those born blind, and those who experience it later in life is marked. In particular, those born blind seem more comfortable with blindness as an identity, whereas those who experience it later feel it more as an impairment and loss. In which case, different contributors will have different opinions about what should come first.
Why worry so much about what contributors will think? Surely it is down to the students – what will they expect to use? If we were talking about books or links, it would be a different matter, but in trying to classify people’s stories and lives the designation is much more significant. More than making some political point about overcoming barriers, it feels like a point of respect – if we are going to offer up people’s lives, we should do so in ways that are consistent with their outlooks.
Then, of course, in thinking about what students would want to use, I realised my assumption that they would seek information on their own barrier first may false. For a blind student wanting to go into law, let’s assume their first choice would be an identical match of circumstances, but for their second preference would they go for a story about a blind person in accountancy or a deaf person in law? Not a clear answer, maybe both?
So I feel left in a situation with neither a clear idea of what users would prefer, nor what would be truest to the contributors.There seems a strong case for classifying twice – put in two lists, one by barrier, one by career – and link to the same stories from both. But again, is that unfamiliar organisation confusing for users, with stories appearing twice over? I’m confused. People just don’t classify well do they?
Careers Service 2.0 