RAY GALLON CULTURECOM Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved User Assistance: Cognitive Architecture The Transformation Society Saturday, 28 September 2013
Jan 27, 2015
RAY GALLONC U L T U R E C O M
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
User Assistance: Cognitive Architecture
The Transfo
rmation Socie
ty
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
Who Is This Guy?Ray Gallon - The Humanist Nerd
Research collaborator and principal, The Transformation Society, a new research and training institute in Barcelona, Spain
■ 20 years in technical communication with major companies such as G.E. Healthcare, Alcatel, IBM, etc.
■ Member, board of directors, Society for Technical Communication (STC)
■ Past president, STC France
■ Award-‐winning radio producer and journalist – CBC, NPR, France Culture, etc. and former programme manager, WNYC-‐FM, New York Public Radio
Owner/Consultant, Culturecom – specialist in usability, content strategy, and user assistance for software
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
Who Is This Guy?Ray Gallon - The Humanist Nerd
NOT AN INFORMATION ARCHITECT!
■ What makes you think you can speak to this crowd?
■The Hairball of Content!
■We’re All Just Content Workers!
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
When User Assistance was “Documentation”
Technical writers were at the end of the food chain:
Following engineers around
Writing what they said they did
https://computing.seas.harvard.edu/download/attachments/51708221/documents.jpg?
http://www.ebsqart.com/Art/FISH/Mixed/732427/650/650/BIG-‐FISH-‐LITTLE-‐FISH-‐Food-‐Chain.jpg
User Assistance was an Add-‐onToday, UA must be a designed subsystem
integrated into the product
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
Provide Decision Support
Modern software’s complexity, features, & power can leave users perplexed – often just when they
have some immediate, contingent need:
“I need to get this done, and NOW!.”
User assistance that is limited to procedures cannot help people with contingent needs.
People with contingent needs are not going to wade through long conceptual texts.
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
Experience is More Important than Taxonomy
In traditional “static” documentation, the product gives meaning to the docs.
Users’ experience with the product takes them from the abstract realm of reading about the product...
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
Experience is More Important than Taxonomy
In traditional “static” documentation, the product gives meaning to the docs.
Users’ experience with the product takes them from the abstract realm of reading about the product...
to the reality of performance.
For software, we can go straight to performance-‐based meaning if we embed the user assistance in the product itself.
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
People Learn Best by Doing
People learn about product use by
doing something and making
connections in the process.
BUT: is memorizing a procedure by
rote necessary for competency?
How do I even know if I need to do this?
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
Performance-Based Meaning?
STEP 1STEP 2STEP 3
DO THIS
DON’T DO THAT
NOTE:WARNING!If conc
epts are
important, and
we
learn best by
doing...
...how do we learn concepts by doing?
Put them where they will be useful and remembered:
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
Double Embeddedness
Embed pr
ocedural
UA direc
tly into
the Inte
rface Embed simple concepts directly
into the UACognitive Science backs this up
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
Cognitive Bases: Gestalt Psychology
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology
Tries to understand how we acquire and maintain stable percepts in a noisy world.
The brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-‐organizing tendencies.
The human eye sees objects in their entirety before perceiving their individual parts
The whole is “other” than the sum of its parts.
We fill in blank spaces to complete images.John Carroll favours this kind of inferential learning in minimalism.
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
Cognitive Bases: Constructivism
Learner experiences an environment first-‐hand, gets trust-‐worthy knowledge.
Self-‐directed learners must act on the environment to acquire and test new knowledge.
Instructors are facilitators, not teachers.
The learning context is central to the learning itself
Learning is an active, social process.
Learners should collaborate to arrive at shared understanding.
This social approach has developed into…
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(learning_theory)
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
Knowledge is activated in the world as much as in the head of an individual.
It exists within systems which are accessed through people participating in activities.
Cognitive Bases: Connectivism
Learning = creating connections and elaborating a network. In this metaphor, a node is anything that can be connected to another node such as an organisation, information, data, feelings and images.
Learning may reside in non-‐human appliances.
Learning is more critical than knowing.
Maintaining and nurturing connections facilitates continual
learning. Perceiving connections between fields, ideas and concepts is a core skill.
Currency (accurate, up-‐to-‐date knowledge) is the intent of learning activities.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectivism
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
Integrated Learning: Dimensions of Competency
Integrated Learning
Literal Content
Communication
Cognition
A1 Beginner
A2 Basic
B1 Threshold
Community
Complexity
Criteria Selection
C1 Functional
B2 Advanced
C2 Mastery Quantity
Qua
lity
In moving from contingent need to confusion, we still learn more.
Interfaces, hardware, software, user assistance, hands-‐on and conceptual combined
COMPLEXITY ≠ CHAOS!
Quantity of information > contingent need
learner gets confused, sense of chaos
Can’t keep track of it all
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
As richness of content increases, our knowledge becomes more and more complex, cognit ive ly speaking. We return regularly to the same place, but on a higher cognitive level
COGNITIVE-‐SYMBOLIC COMPLEXITY
RICH
NES
S OF TH
E CO
NTE
NT
+
+-
The Cognitive Spiral: Generating Cognitive Demand
Bloom’s Pyramid
Adapted from a scheme by Dr. Neus Lorenzo
OPPORTUNIT
Y, PRACTIC
E
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
“EDIBLE!
”
-Guide Michelin
What if a Restaurant Advertised itself like this?
Diners don’t want edible They want delicious!
WE ARE ALL RESPONSIBLE
FOR THE ENTIRE CUSTOM
ER
EXPERIENCE - WHEREVER
WE MAY BE IN THE ORG C
HART
Customers don’t want usable
They want a great experience!
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
What Happens When We Learn by Doing?
Seen this before?
Is it help
ful?
What impression does a user get of your company when s/he sees this on the screen?
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
What Happens When We Learn by Doing?
Roger C. Schank’s Schema -‐ We remember independent, self-‐contained scripts, or Memory Organization Packets (MOP’s)
Restaurant Airplane Clothing Shop
PayBeing seated Eat
Choose
Romantic Conversation
PayBeing seated Eat
Choose
Pay
Choose
Fasten Seatbelt
Try on
MOP’s are composed of scenes, which can be generalized from one MOP to another
Serve wine
REF: http://cogprints.org/637/1/LearnbyDoing_Schank.html
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
What Happens When We Learn by Doing?
If we learn about “paying” in a restaurant...
Are we learning something specific to the MOP “Restaurant?”
Are we learning something generalizable to multiple MOP’s -‐ i.e. a scene called “paying?”
Are we learning something about some more abstract MOP that has nothing to do with the current MOP or scene (e.g. “economy”)?
You are the architect of this experience!
REF: http://cogprints.org/637/1/LearnbyDoing_Schank.html
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
...AND WHEN????
Integrated Competency Learning
Adapted by Dr. Neus Lorenzo from Phil Ball & Keith Kelly (2009) Ref: http://ow.ly/dLK8g & http://goo.gl/Ul3A2
+ Individually significantcontextualisation (contingency)
+Socio-‐cultural construction(information sharing, mentoring)
+Procedural Memorisation
+ Cognitive construction and process reasoning
+Code: Mastery of the language, interface, iconography...
+Thematic knowledge(SME)
User Learning Space
WHERE IN THIS SPACE DO YOU WANT YOUR
USERS?
The architecture of the scenes we design for our user/learners are determinant
factors
Saturday, 28 September 2013
User A
ssista
nce ha
s
to be
able!
And needs to come up first…
A Group is not a Community
“Finding is the new Doing” –Ian Barker
Create your own stakeholder communities-including user/learners as full collaborators
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
Integrated Learning Communities
Make you
r cookie
s PublicLet people know what you
are tracking.
Attribute ma
terial you r
euse in
your UA – fr
om both
Treat
inside
stake
holder
s and
custom
ers th
e same
way
Turn users’
tips and tri
cks
into trainin
g materials
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Presentation © 2013 Ray Gallon all rights reserved
RAY GALLONCULTURECOM
Email: [email protected]
Thank You!
Google Plus: +Ray GallonTwitter: @RayGallonLinkedIn: Ray Gallon
Check out my blog, Rant of a Humanist Nerd:http://humanistnerd.culturecom.net
Portions of this presentation based on research by
the Transformation Society Research group.
Link to Adobe webinars on UA and cognitive science here: http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/2013/02/cognitive_design_user_assistance.html
Related white papers published on Adobe site:•Changing Paradigms in Technology and Communication•Crossing Boundaries: Implications for the Content IndustriesLink: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?event=custom&sku=FS0003673&e=tcs_whitepaper
Saturday, 28 September 2013