design Archives - Page 3 of 54

Silly Design

3 July 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

Time for a brief rant on interface designs. Here we’re talking about two different situations, one device, and and one interface. And, hopefully, we can extract some lessons, because these are just silly design decisions.

First up is our timer. And it’s a good timer, and gets lots of use. Tea, rice, lots of things. And, sometimes, a few things at a time. As you can see, there’re 3 timers. And, as far as I know, we’ve only used at most two at a time. So what’s the problem?

Well, there’re different beeps signaling the end of different timers. And that’s a good thing. Mostly. But there’s one very very silly design decision here. Let me tell you that one has one beep, one has two beeps, and one has three. So, guess which number of beeps goes to which timer? You can see they’re numbered…

Got your guess? It’d be sensible, of course, if the one beep went with the first timer, and two beeps went with the second. But you know we’re not going there! Nope, the first timer has two beeps. The second timer has 3 beeps. And the 3rd timer, of course, has one.

It’s a principle called ‘mapping’ (see Don Norman’s essential reading for anyone who designs for people: The Design of Everyday Things). In it, you make the mapping logical, so for instance between the number of the timer and the number of beeps. How could you get this wrong? (Cliche cue: you had one job…)

On to our second of today’s contestants, the iTunes interface. Now, everyone likes to bash iTunes, and either it’s a bad design for what it’s doing, or it shouldn’t be trying to do too many things. I’m not going there today, I’m going off on something else.

I’ve always managed the files on the qPad through iTunes. It used to be straightforward, but they changed it. Of course. There’re also more ways to do it: AirDrop & iFiles being two. And, frankly, they’re both somewhat confusing. But that’s not my concern today. The new way I use is only a slight modification on the old way, which is why I use it. And it works. But there’s a funny little hiccup…

So, there are two ways to bring up a list of things on your iPad. For one, you select it from the device picture at the top (to the right of the forward/back arrows), and you see a list of things you can access/adjust: music, movies, etc. As you see to the left.

On the other hand (to the right), you select it from a list of devices, and you get the drop down you see to the right. Note that the lists aren’t the same.

Wait, they’re not the same? No, only one has “File Sharing”! So, you have to remember which way to access the device before you can choose to add a file. This is just silly! Only recently have I started remembering which way works (bad design, BTW, trusting to memory), and before that I had to explore. It’s not much, just an extra click, but it’s unnecessary memory load.

The overhead isn’t much, to be clear, but it’s still irritating. Why, why would you have two different ways to access the device, and not have the same information come up? It’s just silly! Moreover, it violates a principle. Here, the principle is consistency (and, arguably, affordances). When you access a device, you expect to be able to manipulate the device. And you don’t expect that two different ways to get to what should be the same place would yield two different suites of information. (And don’t even get me started about the stupid inconsistencies between the mobile and web app versions of LinkedIn!)

At least if you haven’t communicated a clear model about why the one way is different than the other. But it’s not there. It’s a seemingly arbitrary list. We operate on models, but there’s no obvious way to discriminate between these two, so the models are random. Choosing the device, either way, is supposed to access the device. That’s the affordance. Unless you convey clearly why these are different.

This holds for learning too. Interface folks argued that Gloria Gery’s Electronic Performance Support Systems were really making up for bad design. And so, too, is much training. Don argued in his The Invisible Computer that UI should be up front in product design, because they could catch the design decisions that would make it more difficult to use. I want to argue that it’s the same with the training folks: they should be up front in product or service design to catch decisions that will confuse the audience and require extra support costs.

Design, learning or product/service, works best when it aligns with how our brains work. If we own that knowledge, we can then lobby to apply it, and help make our organizations more successful. If we can make happier users, and less support costs, we should. And as Kathy Sierra suggests, really it’s all about learning.

A good publisher

20 June 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

I shot this short little video because, well, I have to say that my experience with ATD has been excellent. They’ve done what I’ve needed: listening when they should, arguing with me when they should, responding to my questions, and executing on their responsibilities professionally. They’ve gone above and beyond, and I’m pleased to have them as my publisher on my most recent tome.

If you’re going to complain about the bad things (or, at least, make fun of them :), I reckon you should highlight the good ones too. They showed their capabilities while serving as co-publisher on my last book, and now they’ve demonstrated the whole deal. Thanks, team!

Game Results

13 June 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

The game we designed (as I talked about yesterday), Quest for Independence, was actually a fair bit of a hit. While we couldn’t talk to kids still, anecdotally we heard that the kids were playing it. And, as the design intended, it led them to talk to the Care counselors. That was good enough, but there was more.

First, the Aussie science program Quantum had a bit on it. They even interviewed me (with a big production about bringing stuff to our house), but never used the footage. They also couldn’t talk to the kids ‘in care’, but it turns out Quest was being used by kids not in care! High schools were using it to explore life after school as well. That was a nice outcome.

Another occurrence brought new action. Sometime after the game launched, I became aware of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) standard for the web. What this did was allowed web pages to do backend processing based upon user actions, and then programmatically change the front end. In short, web pages could react based upon what had happened before.

For Quest, this meant that we could port it to the web! That is, you started the game, the player’s actions were sent to the web, the program could calculate the outcome and render an appropriate new page, with the graphics assembled to represent the game variables, the current location, and more. This was exciting.

And, again, I had a student wanting to do a project. So the project was to take the game graphics, and the programming, and make the game web-playable. And lo, it was done; the game could be played over the web. Most wonderfully, it still can be! (Yay, standards!)

Naturally, I wrote it up (with the student; a principle I always stuck to: even if I usually ended up writing it all, they got credit for their work and ideas). And, as far as I know, it was the very first web-delivered serious game. At the least, without Flash.

The underlying principles in the game also became part of a couple of chapters, and ultimately the alignment between effective education and engaging experiences formed the core of my book on serious game design, Engaging Learning.

One final reflection is that working on this, on a project that really helped real kids, was still one of the most rewarding projects I’ve ever worked on. It’s nice to help clients deliver outcomes, but saving lives that were at risk? That’s just too good. Anyone up for some more ‘hard fun’?

Designing a game

12 June 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

When I was a young academic in Australia, a colleague asked me if I would talk to some folks about a game. He knew that I had designed games before returning to grad school, and had subsequently done one on my thesis research. This group, the Australian Children’s Welfare Agency, had an ‘After Care’ project to assist kids who needed to live independently. They’d spent their budget on a video, comic book, and a poster, but now realized that the kids would play games at the Care centers. I had a talented student who wanted to do a meaningful honours project, and so I agreed.

Following best principles, we talked not only to the project leaders, and the counselors, but more. We weren’t allowed to talk to youth ‘in care’ (for obvious reasons), but they did get us access to some recent graduates. They gave us great insights, and later they playtested the prototype for fine-tuning.

One of the lessons from this was important. The counselors told us that what these kids needed were to learn to shop and cook. While I could have made a game for that, when we talked to the kids we learned that there was more. (My claim: you can’t give me a learning objective I can’t make a game for, though I reserve the right to raise the objective in a taxonomic sense.) They said what was important were the chains. That is, you could get money while you looked for a job, but… They wouldn’t give you money, however, they’d deposit in a bank account. BUT, to get that, you needed ID. To get that, however, you needed references. And so on. So that was the critical focus.

I taught my interface design students HyperCard, to have a simple language to prototype in. This meant that we had an environment that we knew games could be built in. My student did most of the programming, under my direction. When that wasn’t quite sufficient to finish the development, I used some grant money to hire her for the summer to finish it.

The resulting play was good, but the design was lacking (neither my student nor I were graphic designers). I ended up going with the project team leaders to get philanthropic funding to add graphics. (Which introduced bugs I had to fix.) They also had it ported to the PC, which ended up being a mistake.Their hired gun used a platform with an entirely different underlying model and wasn’t able to translate it appropriately. Ouch.

The resulting game, had some specific design features:

It was exploratory, in that the player had to wander around and try to survive.
It was built upon a simple simulation engine, which supported replay.
There were variables, like health and hunger and sleep that would get worse over time, driving action.
The audience was low literacy, so we used graphics to convey variable states, interface elements, and location.
Success was difficult. Jobs were difficult to obtain, and better jobs were even harder. And, of course, you had to discover the chains.
There was coaching: if you were struggling, the game would offer you the opportunity for a hint. If you continued to struggle, eventually you’d get the hint anyway.
There was also a help system, where the basics were laid out.
There were random events, like getting (or losing) money, or having drugs or sex. (We were trying to save lives, and didn’t worry about upsetting the wowsers.)

There was more, but this characterized some of the important elements. In reflecting upon the experience, I realized the alignment between effective education and engaging experiences that means you can, and should, make learning hard fun. I wrote a journal article (with my student) that captured what I will suggest are critical realizations (still!).

They held an event to launch the entire project, including the game (and they gave me a really nice sweater, and Dana something too ;). Tomorrow, I’ll pass on some of the subsequent outcomes.

Services

31 May 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

From time to time, it’s worth a reminder that Quinnovation (the firm behind the blog) is available to help you. Here are the services you can look to from me, in case you want to accelerate your success.

And a wee bit of self-promotion: if expertise comes from years of practice, how about 3+ decades of investigating the breadth and depth of learning & performance, and exploration of technology support? Why not get assistance from where the thinking originates, not the several-steps away diluted version?

Consulting:

Learning Design: are your design processes yielding the outcomes they should and need to? I have worked with many organizations to generate or tighten learning design processes to reflect learning science (not myths). I recognize that most organizations can’t completely revamp their approaches, so I look to the small changes with the biggest impact. A white paper talks about this.

Performance Ecosystem Strategy: are you leading your organization forward in learning (read: innovation) or are you still taking orders for courses? Based on the book, I’ve helped a number of organizations understand the full spectrum of possibilities, evaluate their situation, and prioritize short-, medium-, and long-term steps. Another white paper talks about this.

Games & Mobile: I’ve helped a number of organizations get their minds, strategies, and design processes around mobile and/or games, based upon those books.

Workshops

Want to get your team up to speed on learning science, strategy, games, mobile, or more? I have workshops on each that are interactive, engaging, and effective. Preferably, they’re coupled with followup to extend the learning (applying the learning science), and that can be done in a variety of ways.

Presentations

A number of organizations around the world have booked me to speak to their audiences. They have been about the subjects of my books, or the future of learning technology in general. And have indicated they were quite satisfied with the result ;). If you want a credible, engaging presenter around intelligence augmentation, I’m a candidate.

Writing

In addition to books, I write white papers, blog posts, and articles for others. I could do the same for you.

Coaching

If you’re a learning leader that would like assistance over time addressing your organization’s needs, it would certainly be worth a conversation. I haven’t done this formally, but it seems like a natural extension.

And, of course, there are combinations of these services as well. You can find out more at the official Quinnovation site. Next week we return you to your regularly scheduled blog at this same channel.

Context is key

29 May 2018 by Clark 1 Comment

Workflow learning is one of the new buzzphrases. The notion is that you deliver learning to the point of need, instead of taking people away from the workflow. And I’m a fan. But it’s not as easy as it sounds! Context is a critical issue in making this work, and that’s non-trivial.

When we create learning experiences, typically we do (or should) create an artificial context for learners to practice in. And this makes sense when the performance has high consequences. However, if people are in the workflow, there is a context already. Could we leverage that context for learning instead of creating one? When would this make sense?

I’d suggest that there are two times workflow learning makes sense. For one, if the performers aren’t novices, this becomes an opportunity to provide learning at the point of need to elaborate and extend learning. Say, refining knowledge on sales, marketing, or product when touching one of them. For another, it would make sense if the consequences aren’t high and the ease of repair is easy. So, sending on a workpiece that will get checked anyways.

Of course, we could just do performance support, and not worry about the learning, but we can do that and support learning as well. So, having an additional bit of learning content at the right time, whether alone or in conjunction with performance support, is a ‘good thing’. The difficulties come when we get down to specifics.

Specifically, how do we match the right content with the task? There are several ways. For one, it can just be pull. Here the individual asks for some additional help and/or learning. This isn’t completely trivial either, because you have to have a search mechanism that makes it easy for the performer to get the right stuff. This means federated search, vocabulary control, and more. Nothing you shouldn’t already be worrying about for pull learning anyways, but for the record.

Second, you could do push. Here it gets more dicey. One way is to have content tied to specific instances. This can be hand done as some tools have made possible. That is, you instrument content with help where you find, or think, it could be needed. The other way is to be smart about the context.

And this is where it gets complicated. For such workflow learning to work, you really want to leverage the context, so you need to be able to identify the context. How do you know what they’re doing? Then you need to map that context to content. You could use some signal (c.f. xAPI) that tells you when someone touches something. Then you could write rules that map that touch to the associated content. It might even by description, not hardwired, so the system’s flexible. For instance, it might change the content depending on how many times and how recently this person has done this task. This is all just good learning engineering, but the details matter.

Making workflow learning work is a move towards a more powerful performance ecosystem and workforce, but it requires some backend effort. Not surprising, but worth being clear on.

Sign of a change?

16 May 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

I’ve been touting my recent book on debunking learning myths. Not because it’ll make me independently wealthy (if only!), but because it’s a continuation of my campaign for more learning science in our profession. We need this change! And I wonder if something that happened is a sign of progress.

At the ATD International Conference, as my publishers, they naturally had the book in the bookstore. They told me they’d slightly over-ordered, but lo and behold, it sold out. What’s more, they ordered more, and they sold out too!

Now, there’re lots of things to unpack here. First, it’s a great design. While I did the writing and the ideas for the comics, they chose the cover and title (both over my idea, and they were right ;) and the size, paper, cover material, etc. In short, they did the design. And people have commented on the cover graphic and the tactile feel of the book.

And they priced it right, too. It’s under $20. Which makes it an easy purchase. (Several different folks brought multiple; I signed six for one person!)

What’s more, it wasn’t even my idea! The ‘power behind the throne’ (as I call him) asked for me to address this topic. Sure, I’ve railed about the myths, but I wouldn’t have thought of actually writing a book to address it.

But, honestly, those are additional factors. I don’t want it to do well for any of those reasons. I’m hoping, seriously hoping, that the success is because finally there’s a growing awareness that our profession needs to become more, er, professional.

There’re a lot of little moves that are signaling more effort to lift our game. I and others have taken steps. Of course, I am available to do more. For instance, I have a learning design process audit I offer that’s reasonably priced and will identify wastes and opportunities for the smallest change in your approach for the maximum impact. But however you do it, please do extinguish the myths and practice the known. Please!

Quip: learning & instruction

15 May 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

I spoke at the ATD International Conference last week on myths. I said a number of things (and a number were said about it, too :). However, one comment seems to be getting more traction than others. Moreover, it’s something I say regularly. So I thought I should add it to my collection of Quinn Quips.

The statement is simple:

Learning is action and reflection; instruction is designed action and guided reflection.

What do I mean here? In life, things happen. We make choices, and there are consequences. When we observe them, and reflect, we begin to notice patterns. Some of this can happen unconsciously, but if we want to improve fastest, reflecting helps. This can involve just thinking, or writing, or diagramming, or other ways of representing the contingencies and emerging models.

However, when we want to guide learning, e.g. instruct, one of the tasks we can undertake is creating a problem, and asking the learner to solve it. If we provide resources, and support the thinking afterwards, we increase the likelihood of learning outcomes.

A critical feature of this statement is that the choices of action that we design, and the choices of resources to support reflection (content and representation tools), are critical. And, of course, we might need a series of activities (or application opportunities) to support learning.

An interesting option that emerges here is the opportunity for contextual learning. When an individual is engaged in a task relevant for learning, we can take advantage of it. With resources and reflection facilitation, a performance requirement becomes a learning opportunity!

It’s important that we understand the difference, but recognize (and reflect) the core.

SMEs for Design

25 April 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

In thinking through my design checklist, I was pondering how information comes from SMEs, and the role it plays in learning design. And it occurred to me visually, so of course I diagrammed it.

The problem with getting design guidance from SMEs is that they literally can’t tell us what they do! The way our brains work, our expertise gets compiled away. While they can tell us what they know (and they do!), it’s hard to get what really needs to be understood. So we need a process.

My key is to focus on the decisions that learners will be able to make that they can’t make now. I reckon what’s going to help organizations is not what people know, but how they can apply that to problems to make better choices. And we need SMEs who can articulate that. Which isn’t all SMEs!

That also means that we need models. Information that helps guide learners’ performance while they compile away their expertise. Conceptual models are the key here; causal relationships that can explain what did happen or predict what will happen, so we can choose the outcomes we want. And again, not all SMEs may be able to do this part.

There’s also other useful information SMEs can give us. For one, they can tell us where learners go wrong. Typically, those errors aren’t random, but come from bringing in the wrong model. It would make sense if you’re not fully on top of the learning. And, again we may need more than one SME, as sometimes the theoretical expert (the one who can give us models and/or decisions) isn’t as in tune with what happens in the field, and we may need the supervisor of those performers.

Then, of course, there are the war stories. We need examples of wins (and losses). Ideally, compelling ones (or we may have to exaggerate). They should be (or end up) in the form of stories, to facilitate processing (our brains are wired to parse stories). Of course, after we’re done they should refer to the models, and show the underlying thinking, but that may be our role (and if that’s hard, maybe we either have the wrong story or the wrong model).

Finally, there’s one other way experts can assist us. They’ve found this topic interesting enough to spend the years necessary to be the experts. Find out why they find it so fascinating! Then of course, bake that in.

And it makes sense to gather the information from experts in this order. However, for learning, this information plays roles in different places. To flip it around, our:

introductions need to manifest that intrinsic interest (what will the learners be able to do that they care about?)
concepts need to be presenting those models
examples need to capture those stories
practice need to embed the decisions and
practice needs to provide opportunities to exhibit those misconceptions before they matter
closing may also reference the intrinsic experience in closing the emotional experience

That’s the way I look at it. Does this make sense to you? What am I missing?

It’s here!

18 April 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

So, as you (should) know, I’ve written a book debunking learning myths. Of course, writing it, and getting your mitts on it are two different things! I’ve been seeing my colleagues (the ones kind enough to write a blurb for it) showing off their copies, and bemoaning that mine haven’t arrived. Well, that’s now remedied, it’s here! (Yay!) And in less than a week will be the official release date!

My publishing team (a great group) let me know that they thought it was a particularly nice design (assuring me that they didn’t say that to all the authors ;), and I have to say it looks and feels nice. The cover image and cartoons that accompany every entry are fun, too (thanks, Fran Fernandez)! It’s nicely small, yet still substantial. And fortunately they kept the price down.

You can hear more about the rationale behind the work in a variety of ways:

I’ll be doing a webinar for the Asia Pacific region on Thursday 19 Apr (tomorrow!) 6PM PT (9AM Friday Singapore Time).

I’ll be presenting at ATD’s International Conference in San Diego on Tuesday, May 8th at 1PM.

(There will also be a book signing in the conference book store at 4PM. Come say hi!)

There’s a webinar for ATD on May 24th at 11AM PT (2PM PT).

Another webinar, for the Debunker Club (who contributed) on June 6 at 10AM PT, 1PM ET. Details still to come.

Also, Connie Malamed has threatened to interview me, as have Learnnovators. Stay tuned.

So, you’ve no excuse not to know about the problem! I’d feel a bit foolish about such publicity, if the cause weren’t so important. We need to be better at using learning science. Hope to see you here, there, or around.