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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

More than words

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Monday was the US celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday, and on Tuesday was the inauguration of the first African American president of the United States.   That’s an awesome juxtaposition; that’s change, baby!   I not only found it wonderful, but informative.

As background, I was highly trained to write in a very logical progression, choosing careful vocabulary, and in an objective manner. That’s a side-effect of graduate school and an academic career (one of my previous lives).   It mostly needs to be that way for scientific reasons, but for non-specialists, it’s way too dry.   I also read quite critically, serving on conference program and thesis committees, and on the editorial board for an academic journal. I have had some subsequent experience in writing more generally: for articles, for online learning, and even some marketing material.   And some formal training on speaking, for communicating.   I like to believe I’m not bad, but I always want to get better.

In that context, as I read the text of Martin Luther King’s speech as transcribed in my local newspaper, I was struck by what seemed outright florid prose: “seared in the flames of withering injustice”, “joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity”, etc.   If it was marketing, you’d pan it as over-the-top.   “This is a famous talk?”, I wondered.

Then yesterday I heard President Obama’s inauguration speech, and joined in on tweeting my favorite bits (“judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy”).   It was, quite simply, inspiring.   Afterward, a tweet pointed me to a blog comparing this inauguration speech with ex-President Bush’s farewell address.   This wasn’t a fair comparison (and he’s subsequently updated the post to compare the first inauguration speech of Bush with Obama’s, and it’s very interesting), but it caused me to go back and look at the talk transcript.

Once again, in print, we see what reads like slightly-purple prose: “rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace”, “gathering clouds and raging storms”.   It seems too much, when read, but when I pictured it as being spoken, it has a whole different effect.   That’s important.

Reading and listening are different, and we (should) write differently for each.   It’s difficult in elearning, when we are often required to have written transcripts of all audio.   We have to strike a balance in that instance. But we tend to overwrite; I can take pretty much any designer’s prose and hack 40% off (including my own first pass :).

So how can words that seem over the top on the page come across so sincere and important face-to-face?   It has to do with the delivery, the transparent sincerity and obvious passion.   And that’s the lesson.

For me, I have a personal passion for learning and technology to help individuals and organizations achieve their goals; it’s what I’m here to do.   I talk about putting emotion into learning, too, but I don’t practice it in my speaking as well as I could, and should.   I do use humor, but I need to put more passion into my speaking.   And, with the inspiration from yesterday, I will.

More broadly, however, is something I heard Lance Secretan say: “don’t just motivate, inspire”.   It’s something I try to bake into elearning introductions, inspiring interest in the coming materials. I don’t see it enough, and I think it can be ramped up more than we do.   The clients and the SMEs say that we can’t treat such material in this way, but I think the audiences prefer it.   It’s got to be authentic, but when it is, it’s amazing!

I find that people are most often in the learning field not by default, but by choice; they like creating a difference.   Despite the challenges to doing what you really believe is good work, you persevere, because it matters.   Tap into that passion, and let it show in your work.   Tap into the passions of others when you’re channeling a SME, and let that show.   To the SME, the topic is interesting, so find their passion and channel that, not just the knowledge.   It’s one of my tricks in learning design, and I hope it will become one of yours.   Here’s to better learning!

Usability and Learnability

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Palm has just announced the Palm PrÄ“ as a new smartphone, and it’s got a fair bit of things right.   Like the iPhone it’s got a touchscreen, but adds a keyboard.   And GPS, WiFi, etc.   However, that’s not what I’m on about, but instead key things, like usability.   And there’s a lesson here that I’ve talked about before but I want to generalize it a bit.

To start at the beginning, when Jeff Hawkins designed the first Palm, he cut a block of wood to the size he wanted as a form factor, and then took it with him wherever he went, asking himself “what would I do with this if I could have it make me more effective”.   He ended up with a core list of features that still defines Personal Information Management (PIM) today. Those were Contacts/Addresses, Calendar/DateBook, ToDos, & Memos/Notes.   He added a few essential elements to be ultimately satisfactory and keep from repeating the problems that had plagued earlier attempts at a PDA: synchronizing with your desktop computer, instant on,   rock-solid stability, and absolute simplicity.   The latter got codified into the Zen of Palm.

So what’s the PrÄ“ offering that are steps ahead?   Several things. For one, it’s integrated all the message you can get, SMS, IM, eMail into one place to respond.   And all email accounts into one inbox.   Multiple applications can run at one, and it’s easy to switch between them.   It syncs into the ‘cloud’, automatically.   It’s not out yet, so it’s hard to confirm all the facts (does it have a good phone?), but we can also assume it has memos and ToDos, as it has already been reported as having as cut/copy/paste.

There are two lessons here.   The first is about how to gather your requirements.   It was inspired to spend the time walking around with the brick.   And it’s not obvious how the design process led to the new interface, but they’ve made huge steps in terms of what people need.   It drives me nuts to have to switch apps on the iPhone and have lost the context when I return. It makes me crazy to have to use so many taps to get between my different mailboxes.

This analysis is critical.   I was talking yesterday in an online session about how to do information gathering, and it’s got to be more than SMEs; you’ve got to talk to managers of the people performing, you’ve got to talk to the ‘consumers’ of the learned behavior (not the learners, but those impacted by the learner’s skills after the training), you want to look at the context; ideally you watch them. In usability, we used to talk about anthropological methods or ethnography (real or ‘fake’), and contextual and partipatory inquiry.   You’ve got to really get to know the problem to get the right answer.

The second part is getting the right usability in place, and it’s not trivial.   Koreen Olbrish goes off on instructional design being dead, and I think the problem is really that people follow a cookie cutter approach instead of being critically aware (hence my Deeper ID presentations).   I think that is true for too much (e.g. I recently had the same <expletive deleted> experience with a stupid phone number field in another online form) of practices.   You might by chance get it right, but why do people skimp on any component of a project?   Get the right skills for all components!

Yes, I live in the real world too, and know we can’t always use all the resources we should, but then test the solution first.   I say that you have to test usability before you can test for any learning effect, because if it’s not working, how do you know if it’s problems with the interface design or the instructional design?

So, at a surface level, we have to make it possible for people to interact with our elearning solutions, easily mapping their goals to the available affordances at the interface. This goes further however.   It’s also the underlying architecture.   Portals go wrong not only because they’re so many of them that users can’t figure out where to go, but also because they often are organized according to one persons thoughts, and there are likely to be more than one way to think about the organization.   Good portals provide several different ways to browse, and an ability to search as well.

When we move beyond the elearning ‘course’, to portals, and eCommunity/social networking, we need to think about how these tie together not only conceptually, but also from a usability perspective.   What we don’t want, and likely can’t afford, is having our workers avoiding our technical support because we didn’t make it comprehensible and usable. It’s an extra burden to take this into account, but I reckon it’s as much a job of learning technology design as is project management, understanding how people learn, the communicative properties of media, and more.   This isn’t a place for amateurs, because learning is just too darned important!

learning inside ™?

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I was just reading the posts on the MacWorld Keynote by Phil Shiller, and saw some interesting themes in comments: empowering users, and learning as a key selling item.   These are certainly worth expl0ring.

On the TUAW coverage, they made the comment “Y’know, it seems like iMovie and iPhoto are now designed to repair human failings.”   They were referring to how iMovie could remove any handheld jitters in your movies, and how iPhoto could do some autotagging both geographically and based upon face recognition.   That really struck me as a fantastic product advantage: it makes you better.   It doesn’t improve your skillset, but it allows you to create better outcomes: it’s performance support.

Which is a different solution, but one that is often a more apt one than providing a training course.   People sometimes want to learn how to do it themselves, and other times they are just as happy to have a smart system partner with them to reduce their cognitive load and still produce superior results.   Hence the ‘performance focus’ stage in my strategic approach. It’s part of an overall approach, and also of a performance ecosystem.   I hope it’s in your repertoire.

The other interesting announcement came from their music application: GarageBand.   In it, they now have tutorials on guitar and keyboards; introductory videos built in to teach you instrument basics.   In addition to being able to edit music tracks to create songs, you can learn how to play two versatile instruments.   (For a fee, you can go on and get popular stars to teach you about one of their favorite songs.).   As one of the commenters noted on the iPhone Blog livecast: “Garage Band Instructor beats Guitar Hero”.   And my lad has become an avid Guitar Hero player since he got it for Christmas, yet this may grab his attention.

The deeper meaning harkens back to something I’ve talked about before, the Transformation Economy.   Beyond wanting to have ‘experiences’, we can have experiences that transform us (in ways we value).   Now, I can’t say how compelling the experience with these tutorials will be (yet; I am strongly compelled to get the upgrade); despite Apple’s typically superior comprehension of user experience, there’s no reason to believe they get interactive learning experience yet (e.g they didn’t consult me :).

It’s a real opportunity, however, to have the new “intel inside ™” be “learning inside ™“.   Wouldn’t that be cool?   Too many products in my experience decouple learning, and consequently risk consumer dissatisfaction.   But a second step up from learning the product is learning new skills in the environment.

Sure, there were some other thrills for me: an iPhone app that allows you to control your Keynote preso (unfortunately, only by WiFi apparently), and having outlines in Pages (I write in outlines). I reckon I’ll be forking over for upgrades.   But the big ones were those performance support features, and the learning built into a consumer app.   I think the former is an interesting perspective on consumer value, and the latter could be a major market shift.   What do you think?

Thinking & Learning

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Today I stumbled across two interesting articles.   Both talk about some relevant research on learning, and coincidentally, both are by folks I know.

An alumni bulletin mentioned research done by Hal Pashler (who was a new professor while I was a grad student; I was a teaching assistant for him, and he let me give my first lecture in his class), and talks about the intervals necessary for successful learning.   Will Thalheimer has done a great job publicizing how we need to space learning out, and this research was interesting for the the length of time recommended.

The study provided obscure information (true but unusual), with an initial study, subsequent re-study, and then a test, with varying intervals between the study periods, and between the second study and the test (up to a year).   The article implied the results for studying (no new news: cramming doesn’t work), but the implications for organizational learning.   The interesting result is the potential length of time between studying and performance.

“If you want to remember information for just a week, it is probably best if study sessions are spaced out over a day or two.   On the other hand, if you want to remember information for a year, it is best for learning to be spaced out over about a month.”

Extrapolating from the results, he added, “it seems plausible that whenever the goal is for someone to remember information over a lifetime, it is probably best for them to be re-exposed to it over a number of years.”

“The results imply,” said Pashler, “that instruction that packs a lot of learning into a short period is likely to be extremely inefficient, at least for remembering factual information.”

This latter isn’t new information, but does fly in the face of much formal training conducted on behalf of organizations.   We’ve got to stop massing our information in single event workshops, and starting preparing, reactivating, and reactivating again for anything that isn’t performed daily.

Moving from learning to thinking and doing (it’s not about learning after all), the second one concerns research done by Jonathan Schooler (who was a new faculty member where I was doing my post-doc; we published some work we did together with one of his PhD students).   Schooler’s work has been looking at day-dreaming, and found that it’s not a unitary thing, but actually has a couple of different modes, which differ in whether you’re not aware you’re daydreaming or are, instead, mindful of it.   The latter is to be preferred.

In the one where you’re aware you are daydreaming, you can mentally simulate situations and plan what might happen and how to respond, or review what did happen and consider alternatives.   This works for social situations as well as other forms of interactions.   And the results are beneficial: “people who engage in more daydreaming score higher on experimental measures of creativity, which require people to make a set of unusual connections.”

This is what I mean when I talk about reflection, and in the coming times of increasing change and decreasing knowledge half-life, the ability to be creative will increasingly be a competitive advantage.   So, as I’ve said before, do try to make time for reflection.   It works!

User-Centered System Design

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Back when I did my PhD, I was fortunate to be in Don Norman’s group when they were developing some of the primary design principles about designing for how people really think (“cognitive engineering”).   It focused on designing for the way people work (my twist was designing for how people learn).   I recently ranted about animated gifs, and I’ve got a similar catalyst here.

As background, people don’t do many things exactly the same way. We’re really bad at rote stuff, and instead are widely creative.   If you want information from someone, it might come in many different ways: if you asked how to get somewhere, you might get a map, a set of instructions, a series of landmarks, directions to MapQuest or GoogleMaps, etc.

When you’re designing a web site (or application) that asks for information, you can do several things.   The right thing to do is to have the backend processing be smart.   Put the burden on the system to tolerate user preferences.   For instance, I like that several different address book applications I’ve used accept phone numbers in several different ways: (925) 200-0881, 925.200.0881, 925-200-0881, etc, and remap it to their internal format.   You put it in in a different way, and it comes back in their canonical format.   That *might* drive you mad, but if you vary to widely, it’ll accept your variety just as you want.   Same with dates in many applications.   Great user experience.

Alternatively, if you want to put the burden on the human, provide guidance.   Next to the field, put either instructions (“9 digit starting with area code, no separators”), or better yet, an example (“925-200-0881”) next to the field. This puts the burden on the interface designer to communicate, and the user to adapt so is slightly less elegant, but may be more likely to lead to valid data.   However, it’s at least claer.

The worst case is not to tell the user (presumably not to spoil an elegant interface, cough cough), but to provide feedback if they get it wrong.   The advice above comes after you don’t follow their preferred format.   This is not proactive, but at least it’s helpful, at least if you think that there’s only a small chance they’ll choose any way but the way you expect.

So, of course, I just ran into a bad example where I was entering email addresses.   They had to be separated in the one field, so I could use: spaces, commas, or put them on separate lines.   I tried the latter, and was told it wasn’t in the right format, without telling me what the right format is!   Bad designer, no twinkie!

I’m sorry, but these things were known 15 years ago when I was teaching interface design.   And learning design typically includes some interface design. I mean, you want the learners to be acting, so you’ve got to design interactions, so you’re about usability design as well.   I do believe learning designers need an understanding of usability, even if development really should have all the right skill sets for the necessary jobs: that is a writer for prose, a graphic designer for look and feel, usability expert for interactions, instructional designer for the learning, audio, video, etc.   In the real world, however, you’re likely going to have to do some, or at least evaluate the toolset capabilities, so do get some exposure to basic usability.   A great start is Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things.   Easy and fascinating read, and you’ll never look at the world in the same way again.

However you do it, be sensitive to aesthetics and usability.   You’ll be a better designer, even if you will be a wee bit less tolerant of bad design.   But I think that’s a good thing, or we’ll never move forward!

Formal learning & social networking

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After hearing Mark Oehlert and Brent Schlenker do such a great job on eLearning 2.0 at the Guild’s Summer Seminar, I got my own chance to talk about it to a corporate group, but with a twist.   Much of elearning 2.0 is about informal learning, but the organization was moving to using social networking tools to scaffold their move from face-to-face to more online learning.   So I was asked to talk about social networking and formal learning.

I started from the informal picture, however, both to introduce the 2.0 tools (their environment in particular had blogs, feeds, wikis, discussion boards, portals, and profiles), and to talk about some case studies of successes.   I led to the point that the informal participation has big upside potential, but you can’t spring it on them when they move beyond novice stage, and that wrapping it around the formal learning is a vehicle to help them become comfortable with the tools.   That is, the first reason to use social networking around formal learning is to make it part of the repertoire of the community.

I then segued to my second point, which is that social networking tools are better formal learning. To help make learning ‘stick’, to achieve our goals of retention and transfer, I have previously suggested that there are several activities that accomplish the memory elaboration, specifically connecting it to personal experience, to exercise and extend the conceptualization, and to apply the concepts to specific tasks.   Each of these can be accomplished well through social networking tools.

For example, blogs are really personal (or group) journals, and it’s easy to have a learning task to reflect a couple of times a week (for example) on what the current course means to you personally. It can be to explain things observed in the past, how it applies to current situations, or how it will better prepare people for the future.   It’s about re-activating and re-processing the information (Thiagi‘s exercises, for instance, are great at getting people to re-process information), but here adding in that connection with pre-existing personal context.   Of course, reading other learner’s blog posts, and commenting, can extend the value of the individual post.

Discussion boards are a great way to support extending conceptualizations.   Learners can be asked to post a response to a thought question (or even to have to create one), and comment constructively on someone else’s post. Well-written questions can ask learners to rethink the information in ways that the lecture and examples didn’t cover.     The point is to reprocess and elaborate the information.   Critically reflecting on another’s elaboration requires integrating their thinking with your own, for a real challenge in coming to grips with how they’ve interpreted it (and opportunity to refine one’s own understanding).

While simulations may be the ultimate learning application environment, another valuable tool are group assignments.   Having the learners respond to a challenge where, in teams, they create some written output collaboratively on a wiki is a great chance for them to have to express their understandings.   In doing so, by applying the concept to a context, they need to a shared understanding of the concept, which fosters greater comprehension.

Profiles, as well, can help individuals flesh out information about their fellow learners, and make more meaningful connections (as well as potentially track down useful mentors).   While not as rich as face to face interpersonal interaction, adding personal details helps extend their persona in ways that bring technology-mediated interaction closer to that personal exchange.

These few examples suggest how social networking not only facilitates informal learning, but can and should play a role in formal learning, for the sake of both formal and informal learning.   I’m finding it increasingly difficult to think about when formal learning shouldn’t include a social aspect (except the situation of ‘critical mass’ in totally asynchronous learning).

I’m still not convinced there’s an LMS that integrates social networking tools in a way that makes a smooth segue from formal to informal, though I know Mzinga’s making a stab at it.   You want to move to loose coupling, yet you want seamless integration.   Not sure what the reconciliation is of these.   Your thoughts?

What’s old is new again…

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When I was an undergraduate, I became excited about the connection between computers and learning.   My uni didn’t have a relevant degree back then, but I could design my own if I could get a faculty member to be my mentor.   I found Hugh Mehan and Jim Levin (very lucky on my part), and got to work on their experiment using email as an alternative to classroom discussion.   This was in 1978, and there was no internet, but we had the ARPAnet and off we went.

We found some interesting things, suchas that asynchronous responses were more thoughtful, compared to the IRE (inquire-response-evaluation) format of face to face.   And, messages could handle more than one topic at the same time. However, the overall dialog cycle took longer. Our results and some recommendations were published in 1983.

Imagine my surprise to hear an academic in an interview remark how he discovered that some folks who didn’t interact in the classroom, did find a voice in an online environment.   That was another of our findings, but only 20 years before this online learning expert got going.   I guess sometimes you can be too far ahead of the times…

That’s actually not to the academic’s discredit; it’s a reliable problem for interdisciplinary studies.   In HCI (interface design), you’d get someone from computer science opining about something new to them that was old hat in psychology, and vice versa.   Learning technology is the same way; bringing together techies, learning psychologists, and more, and it’s

I actually got quite a lot of mileage straddling the HCI and EdTech fields, as EdTech had lots to learn from some of the HCI work going on, such as iterative prototyping methods.   There was similarly valuable work going the other way, too, as I’d suggest that some of the more cutting edge psychological stuff (e.g. activity theory) was first explored by the ed community.

The problem is somewhat exacerbated by the different journals: there’s no one clearing house.   Back then we published in Instructional Science.   Now it might be BJET, or Education Technology, or ETRD.   The point being, it’s not easy to track what’s been done before.

So, what’s the point?   I reckon it’s to be eclectic and read broadly, look for inspiration everywhere you go, keep an open mind, go to lots of conferences (e.g. hope to see you at DevLearn) talk to lots of people, and actively looking for the application potential of new ideas.   At least it’s an exciting place to play!

Design: final heuristics

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Part 4 of the 4 part series:

Here‘re the final suite of heuristics I came up with many years ago as a result of looking at our design process and the barriers our cognitive architecture can put in our own way.

Full Spectrum Design: One of the most insidious problems observed in educational multimedia is a tendency to incorporate all the solution into the computer.   The system will be the repository of all the text, sound, graphics, etc, and the instruction.   Unfortunately, this does not properly reflect what’s known about reading text on screen and the role of the teacher.   In conjunction with the No Limits Analysis, another way to get the best design is to consider the full spectrum of media, particularly considering delivering text on paper, having the instruction accomplished by an instructor, etc.   The proper use of the term multimedia is to consider all the available media and their use and to distribute the instructional task across all of them.

No Limits Analysis: After assembling a team, the first step in the design process is analysis, and an important component is proper information gathering to ensure that all relevant possible sources of inspiration have been considered.   However, before we consider what others have done in the same, we should see what we come up with when we think as if there were no limits.   This occurs after the pedagogical problem has been identified but before other examples are considered.   The step is to consider how the problem would be addressed if there were no technological limitations, as if anything could be accomplished as if by magic. Arthur C. Clarke said “any truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, and we‘re really at the stage where the barriers are our imaginations, not the technology.   So stop and think what an ideal solution would be.   You may not be able to achieve what you imagine, but you certainly can‘t if you don‘t identify that option, and you‘ll prematurely limit the solution space.

Kitchen Sink Analysis: After the No Limits Analysis, comes the systematic consideration of other corners of the design space or other relevant prototypes for modification.   Lewis & Reiman suggested that “plagiarism” is an appropriate design strategy (as far as your lawyers would let you, as they cautioned), where ideas are lifted from existing designs rather than reinventing the wheel.   An expansion to this concept is to not only look at what others have done but to also consider how instruction might proceeded without computer support, what theory suggests as an approach, etc.   In short, the suggestion is to exhaustively search all potential sources of input into the design process, including the proverbial ‘kitchen sink’.   This process is both to help populate the design space and discover all constraints.

And let me add one other that I didn‘t explicitly include before:
Lateral input:   Research on brainstorming and creativity (cf D Bono), has shown that besides being systematic and covering all the known or plausible solutions, lateral thinking is valuable. After you‘ve been exhaustive within the box, find ways to get ‘outside the box‘.   Use random inspirations: play a game, doodle, get some random input!   Get silly!   It may not be politically correct anymore, but back when I worked for a learning game company, the CEO (hi, Sky!), used to bring in pizza and beer on Friday afternoon and have some idea sessions!   There are lots of tools and approaches, just make sure you make some concerted effort here.

OK, that‘s it for this series on design.   I hope these past few posts give you some useful guidance or ideas.   I welcome your own!

First: https://blog.learnlets.com/2008/09/design-design-as-search/

Second: https://blog.learnlets.com/2008/09/design-our-barriers/

Third: https://blog.learnlets.com/2008/09/design-the-first-heuristics/

Design: the first heuristics

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Part 3 of a 4 part series:

We talked previously about our cognitive limitations.   Here I list a subset of the heuristics I‘ve discovered across design practices and from experience.   I‘m sure you‘ll find some that seem obvious, and have others of your own. However, I still see instances where these principles would have helped, so I‘m tossing them out there just in case.

Team Design: One problem is covering all the required areas of expertise.   As was discovered in the early days of multimedia, designers should recognize and acknowledge the spectrum of talent required to properly develop a project.   In particular, there should be expertise on the team for the content area, the educational design, the interface design, the programming environment, and each media area to be used.   The management style has to allow the contributions of these experts to the design, and to resolve any fundamental contradictions only upon assessment of each point of view.   The saying is that the room is smarter than the smartest person in the room, but my caveat is that is only true if you manage the process right.   But diversity helps, and you want to find a way to involve diverse viewpoints early on, so ensure a suite of talents on the design team.

Egoless Design: Hand in hand with the above is the requirement for egoless design.   Each team member has to feel comfortable contributing to the overall design and willing to offer and receive constructive criticism.   Egoless programming was the source of this approach, but it holds true fo all group endeavors. The members have to recognize and respect the contributions of each other.   Team leaders can facilitate this by displaying the same quality themselves.   For instance, the opportunity for deliberately silly ideas can support a willingness to take risks.   There should be explicit discussions of process as well as product, as this is likely to prove valuable in not only leading to a high quality of output but in leading to improved capabilities of the team members.

3 Strategies Design: While creativity in the design process can contribute to selecting a good design, all designs will benefit from testing and refinement of the design.   Three strategies from the field of ‘user-centered design’ can be used to characterize an appropriate approach.   This process is captured in the notion of iterative, formative, and situated design, where successive iterations of the design are tested with real data and real users and the results are used to further inform the design process.   It has been reliably demonstrated that single passes at design fail for reasons specifically related to lack of appropriate testing.   In short, the waterfall approach doesn‘t work.   We‘ll find questions we can‘t answer on the basis of existing information and we‘ll have differing opinions. Prototype and test!   Also…

(the Double) Double P’s: Once some designs are generated, it is necessary to start producing limited-capability versions, or prototypes (different from the use of the term for the evolutionary design model), for testing to feed back into the design process.   The prototypes that are created should be of increasing fidelity, but it is tempting to start prototyping them on the computer   However, this can lead to functional fixedness.   A colleague many years ago had a rule for his team that no programming should proceed until a complete ‘storyboard’ has been completed on paper.   This leads to a prescription for the Double P’s: Postponing Programming and Preferring Paper.   User experience work has found that paper can be extremely valuable for experimenting, prototyping, and testing.   Get your answers before you spend lots of money and time!

OK, one more list of heuristics coming up.   And I look forward to yours and your feedback.

First: https://blog.learnlets.com/2008/09/design-design-as-search/

Second: https://blog.learnlets.com/2008/09/design-our-barriers/

Fourth: https://blog.learnlets.com/2008/09/design-final-heuristics/  

Design: our barriers

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Part 2 of a 4 part series:

Cognitive psychology has identified certain characteristics of our brains. When it comes to problem solving, (and we can think of design as problem-solving as well as search), we have certain behaviors that predispose us to certain types of solutions (in other words, prematurely limiting our search space). These include functional fixedness, set-effects, premature evaluation, and, not too surprisingly, social issues.

Functional fixedness is really just about not seeing new applications of a tool.   This can be seen when designers are familiar with a particular implementation tool or environment. The designs then tend to resemble what is easy to do with that tool (the old “when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail”).   Alternatively, they may push the tool beyond it‘s effective range trying to accomplish a particular outcome.   If the tool is the optimal one for the job this is not a problem, but in other cases the tool is familiar and so it is used despite a lack of relevance.   Even in robust design environments, projects often resemble what is easy to implement in that environment, not what the analysis would indicate.

Set effects are solving new problems in ways appropriate for previous problems, whether or not that‘s appropriate now.   In this approach, subjects who had solved several prior problems in a particular way would solve a new problem in that well-practiced way.   However, subjects who had not had that prior experience would find the simpler solution to the problem.   What was identified as “set effects” manifests itself in designers whose new solutions resemble prior solutions even when the old solutions are inappropriate.   While it is true that the consistency produced from set effects is often beneficial, that should be a conscious decision and not the accidental outcome of limitations of the designer or the design process.

Premature evaluation is where problem-solvers will settle on a solution before all possibilities have been considered.   In creativity, one of the hurdles has been when problem-solvers will pursue the first solution path that presents itself rather than delay solution while considering other potential solution paths that might be more effective.   The cognitive overhead in retaining a meta-level of strategy that considers multiple solution paths is often overwhelmed in the efforts to consider all the factors in the problem itself.   Considerable practice can be required to develop good strategic maintenance of strategies as well as solution.

A final set of problems in problem-solving are the social ones: the difficulty of publicly suggesting an idea that may not be accepted, the difficulty in sharing an idea that may not get credited, the difficulty in offering help due to a perception that it may be an intrusion or unwelcome, or the difficulty in accepting help from others whether to not be a burden or to resent intrusion.   Another set of social problems have to do with different domains of expertise.   Most learning technology projects these days require multiple skill sets: writing, media production, software engineering, learning design, management, etc.   Who gets listened to? How do you coordinate this?

I suspect you recognize these problems, but of course the issue is what to do. Coming up in the next two posts: Team Design, Egoless Design, No Limits Analysis, ‘Kitchen Sink’ Analysis, Systematic Creativity, 3 Strategy Design, the (double) Double P’s, and Full Spectrum Design.   What are your ideas?

First: https://blog.learnlets.com/2008/09/design-design-as-search/

Third: https://blog.learnlets.com/2008/09/design-the-first-heuristics/

Fourth: https://blog.learnlets.com/2008/09/design-final-heuristics/