One of the more interesting assertions in Accelerated Expertise (that made me dig up the references) is this idea that ‘designer-centric’ product/system design is suboptimal.
You want ‘expertise-centric’ product design instead.
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I mean, seems pretty obvious that you’d want to study what experts ACTUALLY do, what cues they pay attention to, and design for that instead.
But since CTA isn’t widespread, most products just go with ‘whatever the product designer comes up with’.
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I’m willing to bet there’s a rich literature here. Lots of questions:
- if you design for the expert, say, to augment the expert’s mental models, how does that affect novice users?
- can the product help bring the novice or journeyman up the expertise curve? How?
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Two excellent questions, both of which Cognitive Systems Engineering is intended to answer. But that would require folks to learn. (sorry, I’m a bit salty this morning)
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Really great questions Cedric. Much of CSE work is designed around data representations - what information do we show to the practitioner, at what points in time, and in what kinds of relationships to allow them to track the trajectory of the system they are trying to control.
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By designing to make these relationships explicit & relative to the goals and priorities of the user, the tooling supports the cognitive work inherent in the tasks giving novice users the benefit of an expert's view of the world.
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a product has to be designed with nearly limitless entry points and extend cognition, pulling novices forward but not holding experts back. Cars are a well developed example of a technology that makes nearly everyone skilled at a complex transport technology. Took a while
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