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Schemas for the Real World by: Carina C. Zona App development, especially for social, challenges us to evaluate how to code for the complexity of modern life. Examples include the growing range of labels people ascribe to their important relationships, sexual orientation, and gender. Users are giving push-back to questions that carry ill-fitted assumptions or constrain their responses. Facebook, Google+, and developers in many other industries are grappling with these issues. The most resilient approaches will arise from an app's own foundations. We'll look at schemas' influence on product scope, UX, and analytics. Then we'll check out a range of approaches for bringing modern realities into any app's schema, views, and logic.
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In her talk "Schemas for the Real World," Carina C. Zona explores how app developers, particularly in social media, must acknowledge and adapt to the complexity of human identities. The main theme revolves around the inadequacy of traditional database schemas to represent the multifaceted nature of relationships, gender, and sexual orientation. Zona discusses how users often push back against rigid schemas, which fail to capture their realities and identities. Key Points Discussed: - **Overlap of Roles**: Zona merges her experiences as a Ruby developer and sex educator, emphasizing how cultural changes constantly introduce new labels for relationships and identities. - **User Experience Challenges**: The frustrations users face when forced to select from limited options on apps lead to feelings of alienation. This struggle exemplifies the initial assumptions embedded in database schemas. - **Case Studies**: Zona references Facebook's evolution in relationship status options and Google Plus’s initial missteps in this area, illustrating how user feedback can extend but not wholly resolve the issue of categorization. - **Limitations of Traditional Schemas**: She highlights the inherent problems with relational databases in modeling real-life complexities and advocates for the exploration of graph databases as an alternative. - **Schemas and UX Alignment**: Zona emphasizes the importance of aligning mental schemas (individual perceptions) with database schemas (technical frameworks) to improve user experiences. - **Free-form User Inputs**: Examples from MetaFilter and Diaspora demonstrate the benefits of allowing users to have free-form fields rather than restricted lists, enhancing authenticity and user engagement. - **Trade-offs in Design**: She discusses the necessity of accepting trade-offs in user experience design to balance structured data and personal expression, exemplifying this with the use of auto-suggest features in gender input fields. - **Consequences of Poor Schema Design**: Zona warns that restrictive schemas generate misleading data, impacting the development cycle and user trust. - **Concluding Insights**: The talk wraps up with the recognition that models of reality are complex, and a flexible approach to schema design fosters trust and engagement among users. Developers are encouraged to gather diverse initial data to understand user preferences better, without coercively limiting their options. Ultimately, Zona urges developers to start with an open stance towards user identity and experience, which can lead to richer data collection and a more engaged user base. The flexibility in design, instead of rigidity, aligns better with the evolving way people understand and describe their identities.
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