Group Web - Theory Explained: Screenplay
INTRODUCTION
Hi, we are Rebecca Destello, Robert Racadio, Telle Zeiler and Puja Parakh, and this is our group web project for HCDE 501.
Introduce our names in our own voice, with all four hands in the picture with our first names on the front of our hand, and flip to the back of our hands for our last name [time to coincide with saying each name?]. Once we have all introduce ourselves, we will move our hands out of the picture, which will reveal a piece of paper that says 'Group Web Project - HCDE 501 Spring 2011'.
So today we're going to talk about theory. Oh, GREAT! I know you're thinking. This is what I come on the internet to watch!
Well for those of you who didn't come to watch this, here's a picture of two baby otters holding hands.
Show a picture of two baby otters holding hands.
And I wouldn't blame you. You might be thinking that theory is hard/confusing/stupid/lame/ or pointless. When we imagine people talking about theory, you can probably imagine a group of crazy-haired professors babbling using a bunch of big words that nobody understands. You're afraid of them because you will either feel a) stupid or b) completely distrustful of them.
Draw a picture of two crazy haired, glasses wearing professors babbling. And a sketch of an onlooker looking thoroughly confused. [Bounded rationality blahblahblah][Mmm, yes, I see][WHAT THE EFF?]
It's kinda like those creepy twin kids who end up making up their own language and you know you’re trying to say something, but you just can’t get it.
Show youtube video of dadada videos.
But secret languages lose their scary secretness when you know what all the words mean.
So one of our goals today is to teach you some language to talk about theory and foil your secret babies' plans. So we're probably going to throw a lot of confusing words out that might be new to you, and we'll try to explain them so you can be a theory wizard.
So aside from making you seem aloof and superior to everyone else, what is the purpose of having theories?
Sketch a box
So theory can be used in a number of ways. It can be used to take a situation, represented by this box, and break it down and help make it simpler to understand what's going on.
Draw a picture of the box getting chopped into smaller pieces.
Or theory might be used do the opposite. It might take that same box, shake it around, and break into pieces, and be interested in looking at only the bigger pieces while paying less attention to the rest. The point that I'm trying to make here is that theory is used to FRAME and STRUCTURE how you look at a problem, Whether you use it to break down a situation into smaller, more understandable pieces or you use it to focus on only a specific set of issues. Naturally, some theories are more appropriate for looking at some things than others.
For example, you probably won’t get very far using a theory on how an individual’s brain processes information to explain how flash mobs assemble spontaneously, though you can certainly try. We’ll talk more about this issue later.
Draw a picture of box looking all complicated and messed up.
The other thing to know about theories is that the communities that people form around theories can be pretty dramatic. Like high-school dramatic.
To DRAW an ANALOGY FROM THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED TEEN VAMPIRE SERIES TWILIGHT, SOME THEORISTS ARE TEAM JACOB WHILE OTHERS ARE TEAM EDWARD. SOMETIMES THESE DIVISIONS ARE SO STRONG THAT THEY CAN EVEN TEAR CUTE BABY OTTERS APART. [WHAT? NOOOOOOOOO!]
Show baby otters holding hands separated and wearing Team Jacob/Edward shirts.
And then there are those like Bella who are confused about which mythical monster she's really in love with and runs around despairing the whole freaking series about why we all can't get along. I HATE these people, not because they single-handedly ruin a potentially fascinating vampire-love story, but by being depressed and forlorn and running around the woods for hours alone by themselves...
Show picture of a forlorn girl acting all upset and depressed in the woods.
...But because I find theories to be much more exciting when they outrightly challenge each other, focus on their differences, and in the end make them easier to pick out from the crowd. To call on Twilight once again, only an idiot could ever get vampires and werewolves confused.
COGNITIVE THEORY
Say Hi to Laura [HI LAURA!]
Draw Laura waving
Laura is a UX consultant out of San Diego, and is flying to Seattle to meet with her team. Because she can’t teleport straight to Seattle, she has to do some thinking and make some decisions about how she’s going to get there.
Draw Laura looking at her itinerary.
One way we can try to get in Laura’s mind is to draw from cognitive theory. Cognitive theory is an approach to understand how the mind takes in and processes sensory information (or input) and uses that to take action. Put simply, Cognitive theory equates the mind to a computer. Information (such as the time the plane is leaving on her itinerary) comes into the processing unit (the brain) which then makes decisions and actions based on it. For example:
Laura wants to get her coffee and know she needs to leave now to make sure she has time to stop at Starbucks before her plane leaves.
Draw thought bubble above her head - Starbucks coffee.
You’re probably thinking that this is a really simplistic way to look at things, and you’re right. Cognitive theory is a very mechanistic approach to how cognition works. It has been challenged by others because it assumes that people process information like robots.
Draw picture of a lady robot.
So, now Laura has just 20 minutes to get to the airport and she knows she wants to stop on the way at Starbucks to get her 16 oz mocha-frappuccino with extra whip.
Draw Laura’s head with a thought bubble and a Starbucks coffee in it.
Laura’s mind is processing signals from her stomach [“coffee coffee coffee coffee”] - she only has 20 minutes to get to the airport, can she get her coffee AND catch her flight on time? Her mind processes all of the information available - current time, time of flight, travel time to airport, approximate time to order and receive coffee. Cognitive theory assumes that she has a rational way of making her decision about whether she goes to Starbucks or goes straight to the airport.
Draw Laura figuring time she has left vs. time of flight and process flow of her decision making.
Because people are not robots, this theory doesn’t have much weight. We can revisit this at a later time when our world has been dominated by robot overlords. So let’s move away from this theory for now.
Draw picture of a robots marching - stick figure with a square head.. curly hair for girls.
MENTAL MODELS
So, let’s talk about mental models. Just what is a mental model? At this moment you might be thinking of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition, walking down a cat-walk.
Draw a stick figure wearing a bikini on a beach with palm trees and a sun setting in the background - stick a photo of Cindy Crawford head on it.
While Cindy may be your mental model of a model, that’s not what I’m talking about here.
Draw an X over the image
The theory of mental models comes from Cognitive Theory. A mental model is a person’s mental image of the surrounding world. It draws relationships between the external and internal world. Mental models help shape behavior and define our approach to solving problems and carrying out tasks.
Write out URL for source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_model
Mental models are handy because they can be used to help train a user on a system or to help explain a user's interaction with a system.
For example, we’ve all adjusted the thermostat in our rooms. You think by moving the dial up from 65 to say 85 degrees, your room with heat up faster than if you just moved it to 70 degrees - your ideal room warmth. This is your mental model of how a thermostat works. But in reality, the system works in a much more complicated way... like this!
Show wire schematic of thermostat.
Okay, so let’s get back to Laura. She’s just landed at SeaTac airport and is picking up her rental car.
Paper plane landing on table and a stuffed car (from Finn) rolling up.
She drives her normal route her team’s office. She does this from memory using landmarks as her guide.
Draw street map of her normal route.
But, today, her usual route is closed and she is forced through a detour.
Draw a blockade in her normal route.
Here she faces a problem - she’s never been the other way. She’s only ever been this ONE way. In fact, she’s never been anywhere else in Seattle... just to the office and then back to the airport. For Laura, her mental model of the city looks like this…
Arrows that go straight, up, right, left X marks the spot to the office.
She has traveled just this route at least 6 times, creating a map of how she envisions the city… after exiting the freeway, she knows to turn right at the second light. When she sees a donut shop on the left she knows that at the next light she’ll have to take a left. At the next block, she sees the Starbucks on the right corner – this is her left turn.
Donut shop from street level… blurred buildings… and then Starbucks on the corner and an arrow going left.
[“coffee coffee coffee coffee”]
But today, she is forced down a route she’s never taken and suddenly, her mental model of Seattle starts to expand
Arrows that go straight, up, left, right X marks the spot to the office. More Arrows showing new route to X marks the spot.
Not unlike my disdain for Bella....
Show a photo of Bella, draw mustache and horns on her head.
DISTRIBUTED COGNITION
Laura arrives at her office only to find that during the time she was being detoured, her morning meeting has been moved up, and she’s 15 minutes late.
Smartphone showing a calendar message alert for her meeting at 9am, and a desktop computer showing an email from someone in the group that requested that the meeting be moved to 8:30am. Clock showing it’s now 8:45am. [BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP]
Why can’t all systems work in perfect harmony?
Draw a computer and a smartphone holding hands and a heart between them with a rainbow above them.
Here we need to look at a theory called Distributed Cognition, or what theoreticians affectionately call DCog.
Illustrate the word DCog with hearts and flowers around it.
DCog is the red-headed stepchild of cognitive science that proposes knowledge and cognition are not confined to the individual (or within the skin as some perverse and creepy theorists like to describe). Instead, cognition is distributed ACROSS individuals, objects, artifacts, and tools in the environment.
Draw people and computers/smartphones with arrows going back and forth between them.
Culture is a big part of it, too, because its accumulates partial solutions like how calendaring is the result of addressing problems like time management.
DCog makes use of ethnography to analyze how humans use systems collaboratively to problem-solve. Or, “how mental activity is externalized into the world, as people create external representations to support their own activity or collaborative actions.” [add annotation for Perry, p. 195]
Write out the quote in a speech bubble with a picture of Katy Perry. Write out - probably not the right Perry.
So what does this mean exactly?
Draw a question mark over Katy’s head.
(talk really fast...) Let’s use an example - a good one in this story would be the act of scheduling a team meeting. One person looks at the team’s calendars, decides on a date and time, and sends out a proposal for the meeting. The other team members receive the meeting request in their email box, they view the appointment, most accept and it gets added to their calendars, but maybe one of them will suggest a different time, or send an email back to the scheduler asking for a time change, then the scheduler has to begin the whole process over again.
Draw 4 people in a wide circle, illustrate one as the scheduler sending an appointment out to the group, and one person suggesting a new time, with the appointment going back to the scheduler, and the appointment going back out to the team.
This is an example of DCog because the calendaring system mediates this task. Team members don’t need to keep all of their calendar information in their heads and hope each member can psychically know when they are supposed to meet.
Draw someone a crystal ball and write the words “crystal ball” with an arrow.
In Laura’s situation, someone requested the time change via email to the team 30 minutes before the meeting was scheduled to begin. And since the scheduler didn’t send out an update, the meeting on the calendar itself wasn’t updated. Problem is, Laura was only checking her calendar - not her email, so she didn’t get the time change. Meanwhile, the other team members received the email and arrived at the boardroom on time.
Laura frowning, with “@!#*?!” coming out of her head.
This sort of thing happens a lot. Computer-supported collaborative work (or CSCW) is most effective when everyone is using the same artifacts and tools to collaborate. Today, that didn’t happen, and as a result Laura is late.
Draw a clock showing 8:45am.
Laura is supposed to be presenting her usability test findings and recommendations to the team. Without her, the team is wasting precious development time.
Boardroom filled with team members with scribbles over their heads and furrowed brows.
She knows at this point that she needs to convince the team that she is still a legitimate team member, was honestly late due to a reroute, and crack a joke to bring the spirit of the team back up.
[HAHAHAHA FUNNY]
Social Psychology
Unfortunately for DCog, it doesn’t really have a good way to describe how schmoozing is used to smooth rough edges on a team. How do these team members people feel about each other? And how does that affect how they work together? To understand this level of interaction, we'll have to go away from the systems-oriented thinking of distributed cognition and delve into SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY.
Write out SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Rather than look at how each part of a process functions, such as the people and artifacts that make up a DCog ecosystem... social psychology look at how people interact with each other.
It explains why we like to take it easy when nobody is looking, fit into the crowd, and why we try hard look our best when people are looking at us.
So Laura cracked a couple bad jokes at the meeting. However, the developer Eugene absolutely hates Laura. Here he is looking villainous behind his laptop screen. As if being named Eugene was not enough, you can just imagine the pale cast of his laptop shining across his sun-deprived face.
Draw a picture of developer sitting behind a laptop with angry eyebrows.
You can bet that this misplaced resentment and unusually bright laptop screen makes meetings awkward. Social psychology can be used to explained the impact of these types of [awkward] social interactions.
So you might predict that the developer’s deep loathing of Laura is actually detrimental to the group. But, in fact, it isn’t. Firstly, he’s a developer so he really loathes everyone (not just Laura).
X out the heads of each of the team members
Secondly, he manages to keep it all together because he actually likes being part of the company he works at.
This type of behavior could be described by Common Identity theory. This theory basically says that people can feel socially attached to each other based on some sense of shared identity. For the developer, he likes knowing that he works for a great company and that’s enough to keep him pretty productive with this group people. He doesn’t have any personal attachments to any of these team members, per se, but working at the same company is enough.
Draw a picture of developer hearting the company.
The opposite of the developer is the PM, Jean Pierre, who has googly eyes for Laura.
Draw a picture of the PM with a beret with big googly eyes. Then draw a picture of a fancy tie on him.
He sorta hates his job and if it weren’t for the secret hope of seeing Laura once every quarter, (remember that she usually works remotely), he probably would quit his job and spend the rest of his days raising organic ginger in Hawaii.
Draw a picture of the Hawaii island. Mark a big X where he would dream about having his ginger farm. Maybe also have a mixed drink with an umbrella in it?
This type of attachment to his job can be explained by Common Bond theory, which basically says that the reason Jean Pierre is sticking with the project is because of his personal attachment to Laura. When she finally gets to the meeting, she is both profusely apologetic and profusely sweaty.
Spray the drawing of her with some water and blot it off.
She wants to start the meeting off by expressing her disappointment at the lack of feedback she got from for a draft report. The only person who left any comments was Jean Pierre, who, if you remember, is worrisomely in love with Laura.
This blatant laziness and shirking of responsibility by the team is called social loafing. Basically, people in groups don’t do their fair share of the work because they figure someone else will be doing it. The only reason Jean Pierre even does it is because he’s hoping to get recognition from Laura for his efforts.
A lot of this stuff about social psychology might seem pretty obvious. We can relate to some of these behaviors from our own experiences working in groups.
But the problem with applying it is that there are just so many social psychology theories out there that are so minutely focused on specific types of behaviors that you would have to string together a bunch of theories together to make a coherent argument, and nobody has time for that.
RHETORICAL THEORY
Anyway, back to Laura arriving late to the meeting. How is she going to rectify this situation? Getting back into the good graces of a villainous developer who has it out for her and the rest of the team who’s irritated with her may seem impossible.
Laura with a question mark bubble over her head
As soon as she realized the meeting had been moved and that she was going to be late, Laura began to strategize about how she would win her teammates over. This is the first step in a process called rhetoric. Rhetoric is by far the oldest theory we are looking at today.
A dinosaur.. X out...
Well, not quite that old. It has its roots in ancient Greek civilization.
the Parthenon (or a Corinthian column)
The philosopher Aristotle developed a treatise called Rhetoric in the 4th century B.C. which became the basics of rhetorical theory. Rhetoric is about persuasion, it has its origins in how people use language to get things done. It is fundamental to human communication, and very important for Laura as she must persuade her team that she is a good team player who can produce the results they need to have a successful project despite being late to the meeting.
Laura facing her teammates with question marks between them
So as I was saying, the first step to being successful in rhetoric is to plan out who you need to speak with and what you need to say. In rhetorical theory these are known as rhetorical moves.
Cut to all of us awkwardly dancing/Charlie Brown dancing together.
Not those kinds of moves. Rhetorical moves are the steps you take to build your argument and then argue it successfully. For that, you need to know who your target audience is, and plan out a strategy of what you need to do to communicate with them effectively (in Laura’s case, this means what she needs to do to convince them that she is on top of her project tasks and a valuable team player despite being late).
As soon as she enters the room, Laura makes a quick apology and explains that her usual road to the office had been rerouted so she had to figure out a different way to get here. In addition, she checked only her calendar and not her email on the way in, so she didn’t know that the meeting time had been moved up.
Laura with a speech bubble over her head. In it are the closed road and her blackberry calendar.
These statements use the first type rhetorical appeal, called logos in fancy Greek terms or logic in English. Appeals are arguments that sway us to the speaker’s point of view. It’s hard to argue with someone being late due to road construction they were unaware of and a meeting time update they never received. This piece of her argument appeals to the logic of her teammates (we hope they are logical anyway).
Write logos as the first corner of the rhetorical triangle.
Second, she cracks a self-effacing joke about how she should really learn to teleport herself up to Seattle from San Diego so she wouldn’t have to deal with pesky road closures. She’s making an emotional or pathos appeal. By bringing humor into the situation, she deflates the tension and redirects the energy in the room in a more positive way.
Balloon deflating. Or Laura and her team laughing. Write Pathos as the 2nd leg of the rhetorical triangle.
Finally, she uses the third rhetorical appeal of ethos, which is an appeal based on the character and reputation of the speaker. After using logic to explain her lateness and lightening the mood with a quick joke, she gets right down to business and begins to go through her usability test results. By doing this, she demonstrates that she is serious about this project, she is organized and has valuable results to share that she put together. Her reputation as a hard worker who delivers results is the argument being put forward by Laura at this point.
So… was her rhetoric persuasive enough to change the hearts and minds of her teammates? [YAY LAURA!]
Laura and her team facing each other with lots of hearts between them.
Looks like it! Now the team is focused on reviewing the usability test results to see how users reacted to the latest version of the blog newsletter.
SEMIOTIC ENGINEERING
We haven’t talked much about what this project is that the team is working on together. They have been tasked with switching their company’s e-mail newsletter over to a blog format to allow readers, the employees, more direct access to the blog and provide a way for them to converse publicly with the blog writers and other employees through comments. The latest usability test was to determine if the most recent iteration of their design is well-understood by users. In particular, they created a “Share” function that allows a reader to share a particular blog article with another employee.
Two people, one sharing an article/piece of paper with writing on it with the other person
As it turns out, this piece of functionality, while seemingly obvious to the project team who put it together, is not well understood as a function by users. The tasks involving sharing an article were only completed by 2 of the 7 users tested, and the two who did complete it took over 3 minutes to even find the button.
Laura and her team with sad faces about the results.
Semiotic engineering theory can help out with this situation. “What engineering?” you say. “Semi-what?” Yes, it sounds heady and technical and complex, but semiotic engineering theory really just believes that design is a conversation between the designer and the user, and in this case, the designer’s intended use of the share functionality is not yet understood by users. Semiotic engineering theory is a communication theory; it gives agency back to the designer from the user. As opposed to user-centered design where the designer designs based on what the user wants (design design design design), in semiotic engineering designers are seen as innovators who create functionalities that go beyond what the user asked for, features that are helpful to the user but aren’t things that they would have thought to request in the product.
Question marks.
Huh?
Think about Apple’s iPhone. Were people clamoring to have a phone on which they could download music, applications like Angry Birds and Pandora, look at maps and get directions, check the weather and stocks, surf the web and keep up on Facebook? No. But employees at Apple had these ideas. And they designed the iPhone to do all of these things they invented.
an iPhone - user playing with their iPhone apps while Robert reads through this bit.
Semiotic engineering is what Apple’s iPhone team engaged in to communicate all of these cool features they had put into the phone. The interface of icons that can be tapped to open the associated application. The swiping function that can be used to move through pages in an application. Pinching and zooming to see in more detail what’s on a web page. Now granted, every time Apple releases a new version of the iPhone it includes release notes when you download it explaining what’s new. So that is one way to find out how to use all these cool features, and that’s part of semiotic engineering too. But even if you didn’t read the notes, the product has been designed in such a way as to make it intuitive for users to figure out. That’s semiotic engineering at its best – no user manual needed, the interface communicates what the designer intended naturally and easily.
Happy iPhone user who doesn’t need a manual and is just playing on his phone.
So, back to Laura and her team, sad about the usability results. The design treatment they used for the Share functionality clearly isn’t being understood by users. They need to work out some additional treatments that more clearly convey that this feature exists on each blog article page and also, how it is used. This is the conversational aspect of semiotic engineering; designers and users are in a conversation together. If I don’t understand something you’ve said to me, it is your job to restate it so that I do understand. In this context, the user does not understand what the designer is saying so the feature must be altered to make the intention clear.
Designer speaking “lorem ipsum” text while user looks confused... then cut to translation “this is where the text will go”
Semiotic engineering introduces a radical change in design in that it advocates shifting the design goal statement from producing a product based on user desires to introducing a product based on the designer’s vision. So it’s back to the drawing board for the team on the Share functionality.
Team members in discussion about alternate design treatments.
ACTIVITY THEORY
(Replay entire video so far sped up during this recap)
So let’s review. Back at home in San Diego, Laura calculated her time to the airport with a coffee stop on the way
Then flew from San Diego to Seattle for her team meeting and was late arriving from the airport due to road construction.
Unbeknownst to her, she arrives 15 minutes late to the meeting because it was changed from 9 am to 8:30 am not through the calendaring system but through e-mail.
When she arrives at the meeting, she has to navigate the social dynamics of the villainous developer Eugene who feels superior not only to her but to everyone, and the googley-eyed project manager Jean-Pierre.
She wins back the respect of the team through her joke telling (pathos), hard work (ethos) and reasoning of why she was late (logos).
And the team discovers in their review of the usability findings that the Share feature of the new blog is not being discovered by users so they must go back to the drawing board to redesign it and make it easier to discover and to use.
We can explain a lot of things about Laura’s day through the previously examined theories. But one thing we still don’t have a clear picture of is the underlying motivations for Laura’s actions that day. This is where our last theory, Activity Theory, can help.
[dooodododoo]
Activity Theory is a historical and cultural theory. It looks at behavior while taking into account the influence of culture. It posits that humans are a special type of subject, because through evolution they have developed a complex understanding of the world - they've developed tools, cultural norms, and responses to the world that can't be explained purely by logic.
People don't act without motives. Motive is the key to activity theory. Culture is embedded in objects and carried forward into activity.
AT and Dcog both argue that cognition extends beyond the human mind to include tools, that tools do important work that humans can’t do on their own. However AT believes that humans use tools volitionally for a purposeful, intentional activity while dcog argues that if cognition can be exhibited by one node (such as a human being), it can be exhibited by another (such as an inanimate object).
So what can activity theory tell us about Laura and the things she did today? First, she mapped out a circuitous route to the airport this morning. Question: Why would someone take the back roads to the airport when they need to catch a flight? Answer: She was on a single-minded quest for caffeine before she left!
Second, on her way to the office from the airport, she turned the car around and started driving the opposite direction from the office. What was her motivation? The direct road to the office was closed so she had to turn around and take a different way. Her motivation was to get to the office using a map as a mediating tool to help her because she didn’t know a different way to go.
Show: the previously shown drawing of the circuitous route to the office
Next she uses her iphone to track her schedule because she wants to know which meetings she has today, which ones require her to bring usability results documentation, which ones she’ll have to speak at and which ones she can just observe. The Blackberry is the tool that mediates her calendar for her which is explained through dcog, but the motivation behind why she needs to know which meetings are happening when and what the agenda is for each is explained only through activity theory, which examines her motives.
Finally, the usability report is an artifact used to capture results from a usability test of several participants all in one place. As a tool it mediates the tests by summarizing them so that the entire team has access to what was learned, not just the usability tester. Why look at the report at all though? What’s the purpose of it? The team wants to make a better product, and that is their motivation for reading the report. Once more with feeling, what explains this?
A-C-T-I-V-I-T-Y T-H-E-O-R-Y
If you hadn’t noticed yet, we spoke about her motivations all along while discussing the other theories; it’s hard to understand how her day comes together as it does and why tools are used as they are throughout her day without knowing the motivations behind her actions. Activity theory helps us put Laura’s actions and interactions into context.
So. That’s it. That’s an overview of our different theories. If that wasn’t enough for you, we invite you to read some our “Theories in Action” pages on the site.
~FIN~
Hi, we are Rebecca Destello, Robert Racadio, Telle Zeiler and Puja Parakh, and this is our group web project for HCDE 501.
Introduce our names in our own voice, with all four hands in the picture with our first names on the front of our hand, and flip to the back of our hands for our last name [time to coincide with saying each name?]. Once we have all introduce ourselves, we will move our hands out of the picture, which will reveal a piece of paper that says 'Group Web Project - HCDE 501 Spring 2011'.
So today we're going to talk about theory. Oh, GREAT! I know you're thinking. This is what I come on the internet to watch!
Well for those of you who didn't come to watch this, here's a picture of two baby otters holding hands.
Show a picture of two baby otters holding hands.
And I wouldn't blame you. You might be thinking that theory is hard/confusing/stupid/lame/ or pointless. When we imagine people talking about theory, you can probably imagine a group of crazy-haired professors babbling using a bunch of big words that nobody understands. You're afraid of them because you will either feel a) stupid or b) completely distrustful of them.
Draw a picture of two crazy haired, glasses wearing professors babbling. And a sketch of an onlooker looking thoroughly confused. [Bounded rationality blahblahblah][Mmm, yes, I see][WHAT THE EFF?]
It's kinda like those creepy twin kids who end up making up their own language and you know you’re trying to say something, but you just can’t get it.
Show youtube video of dadada videos.
But secret languages lose their scary secretness when you know what all the words mean.
So one of our goals today is to teach you some language to talk about theory and foil your secret babies' plans. So we're probably going to throw a lot of confusing words out that might be new to you, and we'll try to explain them so you can be a theory wizard.
So aside from making you seem aloof and superior to everyone else, what is the purpose of having theories?
Sketch a box
So theory can be used in a number of ways. It can be used to take a situation, represented by this box, and break it down and help make it simpler to understand what's going on.
Draw a picture of the box getting chopped into smaller pieces.
Or theory might be used do the opposite. It might take that same box, shake it around, and break into pieces, and be interested in looking at only the bigger pieces while paying less attention to the rest. The point that I'm trying to make here is that theory is used to FRAME and STRUCTURE how you look at a problem, Whether you use it to break down a situation into smaller, more understandable pieces or you use it to focus on only a specific set of issues. Naturally, some theories are more appropriate for looking at some things than others.
For example, you probably won’t get very far using a theory on how an individual’s brain processes information to explain how flash mobs assemble spontaneously, though you can certainly try. We’ll talk more about this issue later.
Draw a picture of box looking all complicated and messed up.
The other thing to know about theories is that the communities that people form around theories can be pretty dramatic. Like high-school dramatic.
To DRAW an ANALOGY FROM THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED TEEN VAMPIRE SERIES TWILIGHT, SOME THEORISTS ARE TEAM JACOB WHILE OTHERS ARE TEAM EDWARD. SOMETIMES THESE DIVISIONS ARE SO STRONG THAT THEY CAN EVEN TEAR CUTE BABY OTTERS APART. [WHAT? NOOOOOOOOO!]
Show baby otters holding hands separated and wearing Team Jacob/Edward shirts.
And then there are those like Bella who are confused about which mythical monster she's really in love with and runs around despairing the whole freaking series about why we all can't get along. I HATE these people, not because they single-handedly ruin a potentially fascinating vampire-love story, but by being depressed and forlorn and running around the woods for hours alone by themselves...
Show picture of a forlorn girl acting all upset and depressed in the woods.
...But because I find theories to be much more exciting when they outrightly challenge each other, focus on their differences, and in the end make them easier to pick out from the crowd. To call on Twilight once again, only an idiot could ever get vampires and werewolves confused.
COGNITIVE THEORY
Say Hi to Laura [HI LAURA!]
Draw Laura waving
Laura is a UX consultant out of San Diego, and is flying to Seattle to meet with her team. Because she can’t teleport straight to Seattle, she has to do some thinking and make some decisions about how she’s going to get there.
Draw Laura looking at her itinerary.
One way we can try to get in Laura’s mind is to draw from cognitive theory. Cognitive theory is an approach to understand how the mind takes in and processes sensory information (or input) and uses that to take action. Put simply, Cognitive theory equates the mind to a computer. Information (such as the time the plane is leaving on her itinerary) comes into the processing unit (the brain) which then makes decisions and actions based on it. For example:
Laura wants to get her coffee and know she needs to leave now to make sure she has time to stop at Starbucks before her plane leaves.
Draw thought bubble above her head - Starbucks coffee.
You’re probably thinking that this is a really simplistic way to look at things, and you’re right. Cognitive theory is a very mechanistic approach to how cognition works. It has been challenged by others because it assumes that people process information like robots.
Draw picture of a lady robot.
So, now Laura has just 20 minutes to get to the airport and she knows she wants to stop on the way at Starbucks to get her 16 oz mocha-frappuccino with extra whip.
Draw Laura’s head with a thought bubble and a Starbucks coffee in it.
Laura’s mind is processing signals from her stomach [“coffee coffee coffee coffee”] - she only has 20 minutes to get to the airport, can she get her coffee AND catch her flight on time? Her mind processes all of the information available - current time, time of flight, travel time to airport, approximate time to order and receive coffee. Cognitive theory assumes that she has a rational way of making her decision about whether she goes to Starbucks or goes straight to the airport.
Draw Laura figuring time she has left vs. time of flight and process flow of her decision making.
Because people are not robots, this theory doesn’t have much weight. We can revisit this at a later time when our world has been dominated by robot overlords. So let’s move away from this theory for now.
Draw picture of a robots marching - stick figure with a square head.. curly hair for girls.
MENTAL MODELS
So, let’s talk about mental models. Just what is a mental model? At this moment you might be thinking of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition, walking down a cat-walk.
Draw a stick figure wearing a bikini on a beach with palm trees and a sun setting in the background - stick a photo of Cindy Crawford head on it.
While Cindy may be your mental model of a model, that’s not what I’m talking about here.
Draw an X over the image
The theory of mental models comes from Cognitive Theory. A mental model is a person’s mental image of the surrounding world. It draws relationships between the external and internal world. Mental models help shape behavior and define our approach to solving problems and carrying out tasks.
Write out URL for source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_model
Mental models are handy because they can be used to help train a user on a system or to help explain a user's interaction with a system.
For example, we’ve all adjusted the thermostat in our rooms. You think by moving the dial up from 65 to say 85 degrees, your room with heat up faster than if you just moved it to 70 degrees - your ideal room warmth. This is your mental model of how a thermostat works. But in reality, the system works in a much more complicated way... like this!
Show wire schematic of thermostat.
Okay, so let’s get back to Laura. She’s just landed at SeaTac airport and is picking up her rental car.
Paper plane landing on table and a stuffed car (from Finn) rolling up.
She drives her normal route her team’s office. She does this from memory using landmarks as her guide.
Draw street map of her normal route.
But, today, her usual route is closed and she is forced through a detour.
Draw a blockade in her normal route.
Here she faces a problem - she’s never been the other way. She’s only ever been this ONE way. In fact, she’s never been anywhere else in Seattle... just to the office and then back to the airport. For Laura, her mental model of the city looks like this…
Arrows that go straight, up, right, left X marks the spot to the office.
She has traveled just this route at least 6 times, creating a map of how she envisions the city… after exiting the freeway, she knows to turn right at the second light. When she sees a donut shop on the left she knows that at the next light she’ll have to take a left. At the next block, she sees the Starbucks on the right corner – this is her left turn.
Donut shop from street level… blurred buildings… and then Starbucks on the corner and an arrow going left.
[“coffee coffee coffee coffee”]
But today, she is forced down a route she’s never taken and suddenly, her mental model of Seattle starts to expand
Arrows that go straight, up, left, right X marks the spot to the office. More Arrows showing new route to X marks the spot.
Not unlike my disdain for Bella....
Show a photo of Bella, draw mustache and horns on her head.
DISTRIBUTED COGNITION
Laura arrives at her office only to find that during the time she was being detoured, her morning meeting has been moved up, and she’s 15 minutes late.
Smartphone showing a calendar message alert for her meeting at 9am, and a desktop computer showing an email from someone in the group that requested that the meeting be moved to 8:30am. Clock showing it’s now 8:45am. [BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP]
Why can’t all systems work in perfect harmony?
Draw a computer and a smartphone holding hands and a heart between them with a rainbow above them.
Here we need to look at a theory called Distributed Cognition, or what theoreticians affectionately call DCog.
Illustrate the word DCog with hearts and flowers around it.
DCog is the red-headed stepchild of cognitive science that proposes knowledge and cognition are not confined to the individual (or within the skin as some perverse and creepy theorists like to describe). Instead, cognition is distributed ACROSS individuals, objects, artifacts, and tools in the environment.
Draw people and computers/smartphones with arrows going back and forth between them.
Culture is a big part of it, too, because its accumulates partial solutions like how calendaring is the result of addressing problems like time management.
DCog makes use of ethnography to analyze how humans use systems collaboratively to problem-solve. Or, “how mental activity is externalized into the world, as people create external representations to support their own activity or collaborative actions.” [add annotation for Perry, p. 195]
Write out the quote in a speech bubble with a picture of Katy Perry. Write out - probably not the right Perry.
So what does this mean exactly?
Draw a question mark over Katy’s head.
(talk really fast...) Let’s use an example - a good one in this story would be the act of scheduling a team meeting. One person looks at the team’s calendars, decides on a date and time, and sends out a proposal for the meeting. The other team members receive the meeting request in their email box, they view the appointment, most accept and it gets added to their calendars, but maybe one of them will suggest a different time, or send an email back to the scheduler asking for a time change, then the scheduler has to begin the whole process over again.
Draw 4 people in a wide circle, illustrate one as the scheduler sending an appointment out to the group, and one person suggesting a new time, with the appointment going back to the scheduler, and the appointment going back out to the team.
This is an example of DCog because the calendaring system mediates this task. Team members don’t need to keep all of their calendar information in their heads and hope each member can psychically know when they are supposed to meet.
Draw someone a crystal ball and write the words “crystal ball” with an arrow.
In Laura’s situation, someone requested the time change via email to the team 30 minutes before the meeting was scheduled to begin. And since the scheduler didn’t send out an update, the meeting on the calendar itself wasn’t updated. Problem is, Laura was only checking her calendar - not her email, so she didn’t get the time change. Meanwhile, the other team members received the email and arrived at the boardroom on time.
Laura frowning, with “@!#*?!” coming out of her head.
This sort of thing happens a lot. Computer-supported collaborative work (or CSCW) is most effective when everyone is using the same artifacts and tools to collaborate. Today, that didn’t happen, and as a result Laura is late.
Draw a clock showing 8:45am.
Laura is supposed to be presenting her usability test findings and recommendations to the team. Without her, the team is wasting precious development time.
Boardroom filled with team members with scribbles over their heads and furrowed brows.
She knows at this point that she needs to convince the team that she is still a legitimate team member, was honestly late due to a reroute, and crack a joke to bring the spirit of the team back up.
[HAHAHAHA FUNNY]
Social Psychology
Unfortunately for DCog, it doesn’t really have a good way to describe how schmoozing is used to smooth rough edges on a team. How do these team members people feel about each other? And how does that affect how they work together? To understand this level of interaction, we'll have to go away from the systems-oriented thinking of distributed cognition and delve into SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY.
Write out SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Rather than look at how each part of a process functions, such as the people and artifacts that make up a DCog ecosystem... social psychology look at how people interact with each other.
It explains why we like to take it easy when nobody is looking, fit into the crowd, and why we try hard look our best when people are looking at us.
So Laura cracked a couple bad jokes at the meeting. However, the developer Eugene absolutely hates Laura. Here he is looking villainous behind his laptop screen. As if being named Eugene was not enough, you can just imagine the pale cast of his laptop shining across his sun-deprived face.
Draw a picture of developer sitting behind a laptop with angry eyebrows.
You can bet that this misplaced resentment and unusually bright laptop screen makes meetings awkward. Social psychology can be used to explained the impact of these types of [awkward] social interactions.
So you might predict that the developer’s deep loathing of Laura is actually detrimental to the group. But, in fact, it isn’t. Firstly, he’s a developer so he really loathes everyone (not just Laura).
X out the heads of each of the team members
Secondly, he manages to keep it all together because he actually likes being part of the company he works at.
This type of behavior could be described by Common Identity theory. This theory basically says that people can feel socially attached to each other based on some sense of shared identity. For the developer, he likes knowing that he works for a great company and that’s enough to keep him pretty productive with this group people. He doesn’t have any personal attachments to any of these team members, per se, but working at the same company is enough.
Draw a picture of developer hearting the company.
The opposite of the developer is the PM, Jean Pierre, who has googly eyes for Laura.
Draw a picture of the PM with a beret with big googly eyes. Then draw a picture of a fancy tie on him.
He sorta hates his job and if it weren’t for the secret hope of seeing Laura once every quarter, (remember that she usually works remotely), he probably would quit his job and spend the rest of his days raising organic ginger in Hawaii.
Draw a picture of the Hawaii island. Mark a big X where he would dream about having his ginger farm. Maybe also have a mixed drink with an umbrella in it?
This type of attachment to his job can be explained by Common Bond theory, which basically says that the reason Jean Pierre is sticking with the project is because of his personal attachment to Laura. When she finally gets to the meeting, she is both profusely apologetic and profusely sweaty.
Spray the drawing of her with some water and blot it off.
She wants to start the meeting off by expressing her disappointment at the lack of feedback she got from for a draft report. The only person who left any comments was Jean Pierre, who, if you remember, is worrisomely in love with Laura.
This blatant laziness and shirking of responsibility by the team is called social loafing. Basically, people in groups don’t do their fair share of the work because they figure someone else will be doing it. The only reason Jean Pierre even does it is because he’s hoping to get recognition from Laura for his efforts.
A lot of this stuff about social psychology might seem pretty obvious. We can relate to some of these behaviors from our own experiences working in groups.
But the problem with applying it is that there are just so many social psychology theories out there that are so minutely focused on specific types of behaviors that you would have to string together a bunch of theories together to make a coherent argument, and nobody has time for that.
RHETORICAL THEORY
Anyway, back to Laura arriving late to the meeting. How is she going to rectify this situation? Getting back into the good graces of a villainous developer who has it out for her and the rest of the team who’s irritated with her may seem impossible.
Laura with a question mark bubble over her head
As soon as she realized the meeting had been moved and that she was going to be late, Laura began to strategize about how she would win her teammates over. This is the first step in a process called rhetoric. Rhetoric is by far the oldest theory we are looking at today.
A dinosaur.. X out...
Well, not quite that old. It has its roots in ancient Greek civilization.
the Parthenon (or a Corinthian column)
The philosopher Aristotle developed a treatise called Rhetoric in the 4th century B.C. which became the basics of rhetorical theory. Rhetoric is about persuasion, it has its origins in how people use language to get things done. It is fundamental to human communication, and very important for Laura as she must persuade her team that she is a good team player who can produce the results they need to have a successful project despite being late to the meeting.
Laura facing her teammates with question marks between them
So as I was saying, the first step to being successful in rhetoric is to plan out who you need to speak with and what you need to say. In rhetorical theory these are known as rhetorical moves.
Cut to all of us awkwardly dancing/Charlie Brown dancing together.
Not those kinds of moves. Rhetorical moves are the steps you take to build your argument and then argue it successfully. For that, you need to know who your target audience is, and plan out a strategy of what you need to do to communicate with them effectively (in Laura’s case, this means what she needs to do to convince them that she is on top of her project tasks and a valuable team player despite being late).
As soon as she enters the room, Laura makes a quick apology and explains that her usual road to the office had been rerouted so she had to figure out a different way to get here. In addition, she checked only her calendar and not her email on the way in, so she didn’t know that the meeting time had been moved up.
Laura with a speech bubble over her head. In it are the closed road and her blackberry calendar.
These statements use the first type rhetorical appeal, called logos in fancy Greek terms or logic in English. Appeals are arguments that sway us to the speaker’s point of view. It’s hard to argue with someone being late due to road construction they were unaware of and a meeting time update they never received. This piece of her argument appeals to the logic of her teammates (we hope they are logical anyway).
Write logos as the first corner of the rhetorical triangle.
Second, she cracks a self-effacing joke about how she should really learn to teleport herself up to Seattle from San Diego so she wouldn’t have to deal with pesky road closures. She’s making an emotional or pathos appeal. By bringing humor into the situation, she deflates the tension and redirects the energy in the room in a more positive way.
Balloon deflating. Or Laura and her team laughing. Write Pathos as the 2nd leg of the rhetorical triangle.
Finally, she uses the third rhetorical appeal of ethos, which is an appeal based on the character and reputation of the speaker. After using logic to explain her lateness and lightening the mood with a quick joke, she gets right down to business and begins to go through her usability test results. By doing this, she demonstrates that she is serious about this project, she is organized and has valuable results to share that she put together. Her reputation as a hard worker who delivers results is the argument being put forward by Laura at this point.
So… was her rhetoric persuasive enough to change the hearts and minds of her teammates? [YAY LAURA!]
Laura and her team facing each other with lots of hearts between them.
Looks like it! Now the team is focused on reviewing the usability test results to see how users reacted to the latest version of the blog newsletter.
SEMIOTIC ENGINEERING
We haven’t talked much about what this project is that the team is working on together. They have been tasked with switching their company’s e-mail newsletter over to a blog format to allow readers, the employees, more direct access to the blog and provide a way for them to converse publicly with the blog writers and other employees through comments. The latest usability test was to determine if the most recent iteration of their design is well-understood by users. In particular, they created a “Share” function that allows a reader to share a particular blog article with another employee.
Two people, one sharing an article/piece of paper with writing on it with the other person
As it turns out, this piece of functionality, while seemingly obvious to the project team who put it together, is not well understood as a function by users. The tasks involving sharing an article were only completed by 2 of the 7 users tested, and the two who did complete it took over 3 minutes to even find the button.
Laura and her team with sad faces about the results.
Semiotic engineering theory can help out with this situation. “What engineering?” you say. “Semi-what?” Yes, it sounds heady and technical and complex, but semiotic engineering theory really just believes that design is a conversation between the designer and the user, and in this case, the designer’s intended use of the share functionality is not yet understood by users. Semiotic engineering theory is a communication theory; it gives agency back to the designer from the user. As opposed to user-centered design where the designer designs based on what the user wants (design design design design), in semiotic engineering designers are seen as innovators who create functionalities that go beyond what the user asked for, features that are helpful to the user but aren’t things that they would have thought to request in the product.
Question marks.
Huh?
Think about Apple’s iPhone. Were people clamoring to have a phone on which they could download music, applications like Angry Birds and Pandora, look at maps and get directions, check the weather and stocks, surf the web and keep up on Facebook? No. But employees at Apple had these ideas. And they designed the iPhone to do all of these things they invented.
an iPhone - user playing with their iPhone apps while Robert reads through this bit.
Semiotic engineering is what Apple’s iPhone team engaged in to communicate all of these cool features they had put into the phone. The interface of icons that can be tapped to open the associated application. The swiping function that can be used to move through pages in an application. Pinching and zooming to see in more detail what’s on a web page. Now granted, every time Apple releases a new version of the iPhone it includes release notes when you download it explaining what’s new. So that is one way to find out how to use all these cool features, and that’s part of semiotic engineering too. But even if you didn’t read the notes, the product has been designed in such a way as to make it intuitive for users to figure out. That’s semiotic engineering at its best – no user manual needed, the interface communicates what the designer intended naturally and easily.
Happy iPhone user who doesn’t need a manual and is just playing on his phone.
So, back to Laura and her team, sad about the usability results. The design treatment they used for the Share functionality clearly isn’t being understood by users. They need to work out some additional treatments that more clearly convey that this feature exists on each blog article page and also, how it is used. This is the conversational aspect of semiotic engineering; designers and users are in a conversation together. If I don’t understand something you’ve said to me, it is your job to restate it so that I do understand. In this context, the user does not understand what the designer is saying so the feature must be altered to make the intention clear.
Designer speaking “lorem ipsum” text while user looks confused... then cut to translation “this is where the text will go”
Semiotic engineering introduces a radical change in design in that it advocates shifting the design goal statement from producing a product based on user desires to introducing a product based on the designer’s vision. So it’s back to the drawing board for the team on the Share functionality.
Team members in discussion about alternate design treatments.
ACTIVITY THEORY
(Replay entire video so far sped up during this recap)
So let’s review. Back at home in San Diego, Laura calculated her time to the airport with a coffee stop on the way
Then flew from San Diego to Seattle for her team meeting and was late arriving from the airport due to road construction.
Unbeknownst to her, she arrives 15 minutes late to the meeting because it was changed from 9 am to 8:30 am not through the calendaring system but through e-mail.
When she arrives at the meeting, she has to navigate the social dynamics of the villainous developer Eugene who feels superior not only to her but to everyone, and the googley-eyed project manager Jean-Pierre.
She wins back the respect of the team through her joke telling (pathos), hard work (ethos) and reasoning of why she was late (logos).
And the team discovers in their review of the usability findings that the Share feature of the new blog is not being discovered by users so they must go back to the drawing board to redesign it and make it easier to discover and to use.
We can explain a lot of things about Laura’s day through the previously examined theories. But one thing we still don’t have a clear picture of is the underlying motivations for Laura’s actions that day. This is where our last theory, Activity Theory, can help.
[dooodododoo]
Activity Theory is a historical and cultural theory. It looks at behavior while taking into account the influence of culture. It posits that humans are a special type of subject, because through evolution they have developed a complex understanding of the world - they've developed tools, cultural norms, and responses to the world that can't be explained purely by logic.
People don't act without motives. Motive is the key to activity theory. Culture is embedded in objects and carried forward into activity.
AT and Dcog both argue that cognition extends beyond the human mind to include tools, that tools do important work that humans can’t do on their own. However AT believes that humans use tools volitionally for a purposeful, intentional activity while dcog argues that if cognition can be exhibited by one node (such as a human being), it can be exhibited by another (such as an inanimate object).
So what can activity theory tell us about Laura and the things she did today? First, she mapped out a circuitous route to the airport this morning. Question: Why would someone take the back roads to the airport when they need to catch a flight? Answer: She was on a single-minded quest for caffeine before she left!
Second, on her way to the office from the airport, she turned the car around and started driving the opposite direction from the office. What was her motivation? The direct road to the office was closed so she had to turn around and take a different way. Her motivation was to get to the office using a map as a mediating tool to help her because she didn’t know a different way to go.
Show: the previously shown drawing of the circuitous route to the office
Next she uses her iphone to track her schedule because she wants to know which meetings she has today, which ones require her to bring usability results documentation, which ones she’ll have to speak at and which ones she can just observe. The Blackberry is the tool that mediates her calendar for her which is explained through dcog, but the motivation behind why she needs to know which meetings are happening when and what the agenda is for each is explained only through activity theory, which examines her motives.
Finally, the usability report is an artifact used to capture results from a usability test of several participants all in one place. As a tool it mediates the tests by summarizing them so that the entire team has access to what was learned, not just the usability tester. Why look at the report at all though? What’s the purpose of it? The team wants to make a better product, and that is their motivation for reading the report. Once more with feeling, what explains this?
A-C-T-I-V-I-T-Y T-H-E-O-R-Y
If you hadn’t noticed yet, we spoke about her motivations all along while discussing the other theories; it’s hard to understand how her day comes together as it does and why tools are used as they are throughout her day without knowing the motivations behind her actions. Activity theory helps us put Laura’s actions and interactions into context.
So. That’s it. That’s an overview of our different theories. If that wasn’t enough for you, we invite you to read some our “Theories in Action” pages on the site.
~FIN~