Taught helplessness
From HMCwiki
Taught helplessness stems from a few instances of failure in what appear to be straightforward situations, generalize to every technological object, every mathematics problem? With badly designed objects, constructed so as to lead to misunderstanding – faulty mental models and poor feedback, no wonder people feel self-conscience, especially when they perceive (even if incorrectly) that nobody else is having the same problem. This is much different than learned helplessness, which is the phenomenon in which people experience failure at a task, often numerous times. As a result, they decide the task cannot be done; at least by them: they are helpless. They stop trying. When failure starts, it generalizes self-blame to all things.
Great Questions to ask about any kind of design:
- Are things visible?
- Is there a natural mapping for use?
- Can instruction be diagrammed?
- Has choice-mapping been performed (stepped through the choices along the process path)?
- Are choices intuitive to all? To most?
- Can the most often right choice listed first or placed on the left hand side?
- Is feedback confusing? Does it tell the user the right way?
- Is it built for user friendliness? Hint: in product design, it usually takes six attempts to get it right.
- Do the features design in complexity that render it useless? Hint: technology should never be an excuse for poor design.
- Can you use multiple senses (hospital bed controls used in dark: with bubble for common use button (TV), dimple for emergency call.
- Didn’t you read the manual? This is a sorry excuse for poor design!
- Does the process assume all possible errors will occur?
- Do the constraining choices point to the right one, which is evident and easy to perform?
- Is the procedure orientee-proof
- Is the right way apparent?
- How does the wrong way look?
- Is support information at hand?
- What else is needed?
- What happens next?
- Who should do it?
- How important is it?
- Does it capture attention? Both Whatchouts and Friendly’s?
- Can procedures be taught by demonstratiom and learned by practice?
- Can you use the power of constraints to exert controlled choice?
- Can you make it such that orientation of use doesn’t matter (if it doesn’t)?
- Can relevant parts be made visible?
- Which win: aesthetics or visible function?
- Is there unwarranted complexity? Can it be avoided by good display?
- Is there proper distinction (obvious) where needed?
- Does it require remembering more than six items at one time?
- Are actions reversible (in case of boo-boo’s)?
- Does the degree of correct design match the consequence of wrong action?
- Has feature’ism creeped in?
- Can you discover the right design through conceiving poor design: - Make things invisible, or widen the gulf of choice execution. - Make things arbitrary (non-obvious instructions)? - Make instructions unintelligible (using small print on billing for a Medicare population)? - Make operations (allowing a single erroneous action to destroy invaluable work)?
- Is your design so user-centered that they know what to do and can tell what is going on?
- Is it set up such that once the process is understood, they can bypass beginner prompts?
- Does the design take away user control?
- Does the system design for the possibility of error?
- Can you use ‘force functions’ to force the right way?
References and resources
Generated from the fine book, "The Psychology of Design"… Donald Norman
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