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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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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Good design gives experts the capability to explore more/ different kinds of representations by giving access to more of the underlying data to flexibly apply their expertise to the problem but avoids data overload.
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This is a great paper that covers a lot of ground related to your questions.
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Incredible, thank you! Are there survey papers or books that summarise the state of the field at a particular point in time? Downloaded the paper, and can't wait to dig in.
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Working Minds: A Practitioner's Guide to Cognitive Task Analysis by Beth Crandall, Gary Klein and Robert Hoffman is an excellent resource if you are looking to dig in. There's a wide range of really accessible techniques to get you started.
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