Reading article by Brigitte Kaltenbacher From Prediction to Emergence in the Journal of Information Architecture. A nice complement this weekend to the presentation I'm creating on the SharePoint mashup we used for the recent rollout. Kaltenbacher provides a definition of intuitive from Spool (2005) that defines it as readily transferred existing skills. Some of what we were successful with in this mashup gave me insight into some of the user's pre-existing navigational skills. The common denominator across these roles is pretty low: everyone seems to be able to embrace single signon, click on hyperlinks, follow a flow of logical information chunks to scaffold their experience and use the back button in the browser. Beyond that, comfort and intuition start to vary widely. And, instructions? Pretty much a waste of time. People don't read them on paper - - they REALLY don't read them on the web.
What they requested as improvements also gave me insights into what needs to go into the next design. The need boils down to allowing personalization options based on simple questions that gets at their web navigational intuition. What feels intuitive is really based on the applications they frequently use. I don't think there is a one size fits all common denominator for the whole user interface which makes sense give the variety of activities that people complete on the web in their personal lives and the variety of user interfaces in the medical and clinical products in this industry. Sure, we can impose one but then we add the burden of learning one user interface to learn how to use another user interface or tool. Feels like wasting time to me building patterns to just tear them down.
I keep coming back to an idea I had a while back which is to start the learner's experience by asking what they do most frequently on the web: shopping? photosharing? reading news? social media? viewing and loading videos? downloading music? open source development? searching for information? I'm guessing there are probably about 10-12 basic questions representing web UIs that get at 90% of the choices. I would exclude email as an option since it is typically a time sucking user interface given its stand alone non-contextual nature. Then, I would present the content in the frequent user interface based on the answers to their questions. Of course, similar to a preview template concept, if the user is curious about how the content looks in twitter style vs youtube style vs. e-bay style, they could check it out. I'm thinking that would make transferring acquired skills a lot easier which, of course, is what I'm looking for. Let the user's limited time in task go into interacting with the new content and processes they need to learn, not the user interface to get at the new knowledge and skills. I'm tired of trying to chase the holy grail of the intuitive user interface and just create more information overload. No matter how good it is, it will require time to figure out the pattern. Makes more sense to allow the user to identify their preferences and adjust the content to a familiar pattern
This article is also making me think about acquired intuition when a user interface or experience changes. We complain about something new when it changes - - even if the change is for the better - - but them quickly set about forming a pattern in our brain of how it works. Patterns: our frenemy in the user experience space. I'm noodling over the type of introduction and learning experience you want to use when trying to change up aquired intuitions in clinicians. There will be quite a bit of that going on this year as more healthcare organizations have to rollout enterprise products such as Microsoft 7, Office 2007 and in our case with Epic, a significant user interface change. With Epic, it is a cleaner user interface and should improve the experience. The challenge is, how to get people who just acquired a new pattern to trade what they know for what they don't?
I've been experiencing this myself with the copy of MicroSoft Powerpoint 2007 I got for next to nothing a few weeks ago. The SmartArt tools are well suited for my presentation style so that hooks me into taking the time to use the newer software instead of the older version. On the other hand, I spend a lot of time looking around for functionality I used to know automatically and still haven't found - - like Free Rotate.
I've been experiencing this myself with the copy of MicroSoft Powerpoint 2007 I got for next to nothing a few weeks ago. The SmartArt tools are well suited for my presentation style so that hooks me into taking the time to use the newer software instead of the older version. On the other hand, I spend a lot of time looking around for functionality I used to know automatically and still haven't found - - like Free Rotate.
Reminds me of one of the many themes from Big Jake: changing times requires practice and patience from the expert and the novice. Yeah, I can get just about any theme out of my top ten movies.
