Archive for category Interaction Design
Learning Theories for Interaction Designers #5 – Case-based Reasoning
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on April 6th, 2010
Roger Schank's most ambitious idea, The Reminding Machine, would be a massive collection of stories cataloguing what "smart people" know and how they deal with complex situations.
In leading up to my presentation at IA Summit 2010, “Think Like an Instructional Designer,” I’m posting on the important learning theories that any interaction designer would be well served to know the basics of.
Theory #5 – Case-Based Reasoning
Most famous learning theories seem to be closely associated with a personality (sometimes a pair of them), but few stand so fully in their author’s shadow as case-based reasoning does in that of Roger Schank. Schank is a bit of a rarefied character in the world of educational psychology – probably because he has serious chops in the far sexier field of Artificial Intelligence(AI). UX people will relate to this theory, because it is basically saying people learn by prototyping stuff. In Schank’s model, learners create generalizations from a rich set of case histories, rather than from explicitly rendered rules or other forms of procedural knowledge. Schank’s theories might be likened to a branching network of potential outcomes in which the learner induces her way to the correct path by failing in the other ones. This is often not the byproduct of actual failure, but the more subtle letdown that occurs when something is not what the learner expects to see. He calls these “expectation failures,” which he proposes are more easily indexed by the brain and therefore are a higher form of learning than, say, rote memorization. It won’t surprise you that a variant of CBR, rule-induction, is a cornerstone of machine learning theory.
Learning Theories for Interaction Designers #4 – Cognitive Flexibility Theory
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on April 6th, 2010
KANE - short for "Knowledge Acquisition in Non-Linear Environments" was an interactive laser-disc based on the film Citizen Kane. An early example of cognitive flexibility theory put into practice.
In leading up to my presentation at IA Summit 2010, “Think Like an Instructional Designer,” I’m posting on the important learning theories that any interaction designer would be well served to know the basics of.
Theory #4 – Cognitive Flexibility Theory
If ever there was a learning theory that was tailor-made for the web interaction designer, it is cognitive flexibility theory. In fact, the theory’s emphasis on the power of hypertext would imply that it was developed with the world-wide web specifically in mind. Yet it came to prominence in 1992, right about when the Mosaic browser started development, and before the ubiquity of the modern web . So ironically, its most famous implementation deploys a special laserdisc of the movie Citizen Kane that serves up scenes in non-linear “random access” mode.
Learning Theories for Interaction Designers #3 – Cognitive Apprenticeship Theory
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on April 5th, 2010
Verner Von Croy mentors Lara Croft directly within the main game play of Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. Most games have dedicated training modules and are therefore less compliant with cognitive apprenticeship theory.
In leading up to my presentation at IA Summit 2010, “Think Like an Instructional Designer,” I’m posting on the important learning theories that any interaction designer would be well served to know the basics of.
Theory #3 – Cognitive Apprenticeship Theory
Cognitive Apprenticeship Theory can be a powerful instructional framework for interaction design, in fact it’s one of my favorites to think about, but it’s best not to take the theory too literally. Collins and Brown, most closely associated with the theory, were writing some 20-odd years ago and they did not have computerized environments in mind at the time (they were mostly interested in classroom pedagogy.) Their genius lay in the recognition of a theoretical gap between students’ learning to integrate sub-skills and conceptual knowledge. Despite the educator’s best intentions, when the two were unintegrated, the information remained inert. They started to notice that the most successful in-school learning had very similar characteristics to out-of-school learning (most notably the concept of “apprenticeship”.) They observed a strong interplay between observation, scaffolding, and increasing amounts of independent practice. And while many before them had emphasized the power of conceptual learning and independent practice (see Lave), they thought more about how to provide “internalized guides” during periods of relatively independent practice. CAT is an extension of situated learning theory, but rather than leave things as a purely sociological construct (e.g. Lave & Wegner’s “communities of practice”) they placed a strong emphasis on methods (modeling, coaching, scaffolding, fading, articulation) and sequence (global before local, increasing complexity, increasing diversity.)
Learning Theories For Interaction Designers #2: Schema Theory
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on April 5th, 2010
A diagram of a someone's possible schema for the concept of "egg." Source: P.Davis 1991
Schema theory is a foundational element in almost all cognitivist descriptions of learning, and this one will likely make immediate sense to user experience practitioners because it is tightly entwined with the familiar concept of mental models. The theory emphasizes the role of prior knowledge and provides a robust explanatory framework for how expert performance is attained. Ok, so what’s a schema? Piaget defined the term in 1926 as a mental representation of an associated set of perceptions, ideas, and/or actions. Think of a schema as a network of connected facts and concepts into which any newly-formed structures can be fitted. Then think of your brain as a bigger network of overlapping schema and sub-schema. The schema themselves are a markup language for the brain, cognitive XML if you will. Schema theory explains why we remember things so subjectively (In Bartlett’s 1932 research on people’s memory of stories such as the “The War of the Ghosts,” he found that in reconstructing a story they added elements of their own culture. This is famously considered evidence of schema theory’s existence.) More interestingly to designers, the theory can be exploited to provide more effective instructional materials.
Learning Theories for Interaction Designers #1 – Situated Learning
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on April 3rd, 2010
Microsoft's famous disaster, "Bob," was an early attempt to introduce situated learning theory to mainstream computing.
In leading up to my presentation at IA Summit 2010, “Think Like an Instructional Designer,” I’m posting on the important learning theories that any interaction designer would be well served to know the basics of. Even if you are working on a project that is not explicitly “educational,” knowledge of how people absorb information and build meaning out of your content will strengthen your designs.
#1 – Situated Learning Theory (or “Situated Cognition”)
Think Like an Instructional Designer: Structured vs. Discovery Learning Environments
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on March 31st, 2010
In the Diamond Age, Stephenson imagines the ultimate discovery learning environment.
Let’s look to the fictional near-future of Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age in order to set the tone. Nell is the novel’s young protagonist. She is born of limited means to a lower-class single mother named Tequila, but then rises to be a free-thinker and a leader who transcends her class with the help of a nano-technology powered instructional aid, the “The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.” The Primer is state-of-the art interactive technology. A fairy tale book, of sorts, but one with amazing properties. First of all, it talks – and not in that robo-voice of the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech feature, but in an uncannily human neo-Victorian contralto. The Primer not only recognizes the user and the details of her environment, it can actually work those into the narrative flow. When Nell wonders aloud during one story “What’s a Raven?”- the book stops and explains it to her – then it gives her a brief, age-appropriate quiz on how to spell the word. It is, in other words, a rich, engaging, and perfectly scaffolded learning environment sensitive to the needs of the individual learner.
The Myth of Hand-Eye Coordination
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on February 10th, 2010
Teens work on their hand-eye coordination playing Dragon's Lair - circa 1983. Photo credit: The Tribune News
I’m from the earliest generation of gamers. The first, really. I played table-top Pong when I was 7 or 8, even though it was only available in bars (parenting was more relaxed then.) I played Missile Command, despite the fact that it was kinda boring. Robotron was an obsession. I played Zork, with it’s command line interface, on my Apple IIc - drawing my own map. In college I got sucked into Myst, and Super Mario Bro.’s and there were dozens of others along the way. And then, like nearly everybody else of my generation, I quit playing video games. Why? In a word, guilt. Games were considered indulgent, addictive, violent -something for man-boys. Certainly not suitable terrain for serious people. But throughout this entire period of moralization against gaming there was always a bit of pop cognitive science floating around in defense of video games. Games build hand-eye coordination, people would say -everybody would say. After a 7 hour stint on the couch I’d think, well, at least I’ve got that going for me. In graduate school I studied cognitive science and learning theories and even video games- and never once encountered the phrase hand-eye coordination. So I set myself to wondering – what is it? is it important? and does playing video games improve it?
The Design of Traffic Control
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on February 3rd, 2010
How do you know if you are well suited to a career in information architecture? Well, here’s a little test. When you are finished reading this post, follow the link I provide to the US Department of Transportation’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices(MUTCD), which is the definitive, 864 page style guide for the country’s road signs, signals, and traffic markings. If you soon find yourself delightfully lost in the visual minutiae and obscene specificity of the guidance provided, then you are either Rain Man or what I suspect is a natural born IA.
Interaction Design & Sustainability Case Study: Ford SmartGuage with EcoGuide
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Reviews on December 4th, 2009
The dashboard that monitors what the driver is doing, not the machine.
Ok, so I admit that I have a tendency to overvalue the impact of my own profession. I believe Malcom McCullough when he says that interaction design is likely to be one of the great liberal arts of the 21st century. The great American novel, when it finally arrives, will be planned in Omnigraffle. And the fact that most of us deploy our tradecraft in the service of streamlining the movie rental process, selling sunglasses or laminate flooring, facilitating the sharing of snapshots and how-to articles on pumpkin carving does not diminish our greatness. In fact, in my world, interaction designers are likely to be key players in all forms of meaningful societal change from here on in. (Just try and tell me that Obama’s website wasn’t pivotal in his election!) But what role does I.D. have in making the planet greener? Even I struggled with that one.
Anti-pattern: Periphrasis
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on November 19th, 2009
IA's Should Make Aggressive Use of the Red Pen on Wireframes & Designs
Two weeks ago, I wrote about precision in language and presented a strategy to identify competing meanings for words used in UI nomenclature. Today, I’d like to focus on storytelling and the crucial art of editing. If you are an Interaction Designer or a client or teammate of one who has a case of periphrasis, you should order a big, fat red felt marker immediately so you can attack the wireframes you are reviewing with the zeal of a stingy New Yorker editor.
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