Boxes and Arrows: Comments by John Donohoe

John Donohoe — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 18:52:11 GMT

Thanks for the terrific article. It amazes me how applying basic cognitive psychology can improve our understanding of most anything we humans interact with. A number of your points reminded me of theories we discussed in my Instructional Design and Technology program.

Much of what your article touches on is how we prepare a user for interaction and then once engaged, how do we deliver content that is meaningful and effective. The reminds me a great deal of Gagne’s 9 Events of Instruction

1. Gain attention (Stimuli activates receptors)

2. Inform learners of objectives (Creates level of expectation for learning)

3. Stimulate recall of prior learning (Retrieval and activation of short-term memory)

4. Present the content (Selective perception of content)

5. Provide “learning guidance” (Semantic encoding for storage long-term memory)

6. Elicit performance (practice)

7. Provide feedback (Reinforcement and assessment of correct performance)

8. Assess performance (Retrieval and reinforcement of content as final evaluation)

9. Enhance retention and transfer to the job (Retrieval and generalization of learned skill to new situation)

While hopefully your average UI doesn’t require the learning curve that these steps assumes, I find it interesting that some of the more fundamental steps are present in most all human interactions.

1. Gain attention (Stimuli activates receptors)
3. Stimulate recall of prior learning (Retrieval and activation of short-term memory)
6. Elicit performance (practice)
7. Provide feedback (Reinforcement and assessment of correct performance)

John Donohoe — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:44:56 GMT

I’ll have to look up Huitt. Not familiar with that work. Thanks for the lead.

As for Merrill, one of my favorite quotes of all time is “information is not instruction.” Perfect.

John Donohoe — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:30:12 GMT

“And search engines are not discriminatory: they will return all hits on a given search, whether they are relevant or not. ” This is why some onlines businesses are emerging that apply the critical thinking of actual humans instead of using algorithms to power thier content searches and taxonimies. The April issue of Wired has a short article on the subject: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-04/bz_curator…

John Donohoe — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:08:52 GMT

Thank you for a great article. Rating systems have definitely helped put some of the power into the hands of the people but like you said, they can be flawed and implemented poorly. I appreciate your effort to help offer some thoughts about best practices.

A couple of things occurred to me while I read this article:

“Real Names increases likelihood of Responsible Content”
I was struck by your comment about Amazon’s use of “Real Names” to promote social responsibility in the rating system. This assumes that the old saw that anonymity on the web fosters poor behavior. I believed the same thing until I saw a few studies that have shown that ‘real names’ does not do much to improve online social graces. I guess the take away is if others perceive that a rating by a user with a ‘real name’ is more reliable, so much the better but in terms of data collection, it may not make much difference.

One research report – http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/jul/12/guardian…

“Finding an Appropriate Rating Instrument”
Your point about appropriate rating systems is important. Everyone has “5 stars” on the brain – from iTunes to Amazon to Netflix and beyond. It’s great for a simple interface design but often it’s woefully inappropriate for the context it’s being used for. Some things are just too complicated to reduce to a single representative number.

I recently had a similar conversation concerning Likert scales on political surveys. Many of the hot-topic issues are so nuanced that a 5 point scale doesn’t really allow me to express my thoughts accurately ( Do I “somewhat support” abortion? What does that even mean?).

Creating an appropriate measuring instrument is just as important as making the decision to ask for rating feedback in the first place.