Seeing To It

It has been a while since posting about the interaction between an 18 month-old and technology, but today a real-life analogy just couldn't be passed up. As is her practice, this morning she was playing with the remote control. In just a brief time she has learned what turns the TV on and what turns it off, and when she is interested in watching it she makes sure she doesn't hit the red button. However, today she was experimenting with the other buttons, and changed the source. When she saw the signal go away, she held the remote up to me and said, "Please."

Resisting the urge to teach her to say PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair, a similar error to the ID-1-0T error recorded on countless help tickets across the electronic world), I diagnosed and fixed the problem, adn was struck by a thought. We try to design systems that are useful and usable, and we have all seen that erring on the side of usefulness leads to a reduction in usefulness. What if we added a dimension of our system deisgns to include an educational element so that we could maximize the usefulness?

I'm not suggesting that we go to the point where we have users issuing complicated command line statements, but I am suggesting that a partnership between technology and users can be a more powerful way of doing things. The desire to learn new things is a necessary component in a continuingly successful career, especially these days (desire to learn may not even be enough in some areas, but if changes are rolling through a shop and there is someone who likes learning, they will be one of the last to be put out), and as more users develop or display this, it is a good time to get some institutional knowledge developed.

It wouldn't be nearly as intriguing to me as a parent if Sophie kept hitting the off button. It would be absolutely annoying to have to keep fixing the same thing. The interesting thing came from the fact that she made a new mistake, and then wasn't afraid to claim it and ask for help. At this rate she'll be self-sufficient in this particular technical skill soon, able to handle a number of things that she had to learn and experiment with. How much more could our systems do with the same equipment if we could introduce a learning and teaching aspect, rather than a call/repair topology? Perhaps JAD (joint application development) should more properly be scoped as JAL (joint application leverage), adn a focus be put on the work to be done and not the color of the new bells and the tone of the new whistles.