Ann's Rant: Successfully Trained People are Happy, Creative Users

I've been watching the adverts for Orange and their new emphasis on training, They start with the idea that people will use more of their phones if they learn how to. There is a lot of parody in the adverts: learning by rote, small children put in charge because they, not their parents, are the ones who have figured out the detail of the extra phone functionality. (As the Guardian rightly pointed out, it's not just that children are curious, they also have time on their side.)

And it made me think that we need a new dimension to add to the conceptual models that underlie training in technology. Traditional thinking about what goes on in users' heads concerns their understanding of what they are trying to use. Recently William Hudson gave us a round-up of that thinking at the UPA meeting for May (see UN article: A Practical Application of Mental Models).

There are two salient aspects to this: how kit works and how to use it. These two elements result in entirely different kinds of mental outcome (ostensibly a structural and a procedural model). Many people will only engage with one model if they never have to fix their tools: the procedural. People tend to forget both models for items they don't use regularly.

Whichever model is presented to a novice – either by the system or by the trainer – it's questionable whether 'model' is the right word for what users then hold; after all, use is something that is created in the moment in response to a move to act. Mostly coherent 'models' appear when people are asked to describe things, which is not the same type of mental function as using them. Description usually has a large element of rationalisation in it, which is part of its value in training.

But the term operates as a metaphor for our cognitive processes – a convenient fiction for designers of systems, if you like. Clearly users take actions based on cues in the environment – and ideally in the technology – and these can be viewed systematically even if they don't start out that way.

So, having knocked down the theoretical basis for mental models, I am now going to talk about yet another practical application for the bunch of responses they describe so neatly.

Let me ask you then, what 'model' do people have of themselves using a piece of technology? This sounds like asking the same question as how they use it, but it's not. This model is focussed on the self, not the kit. It is not about how the kit works, generic. It's about me and my hopes and fears and the novel and productive things I can do with my stuff.

Imagine a class of adult learners meeting the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet package for the first time. Do they have flashes of the future, when they can use it competently? Or do they suddenly associate it with a moment in their past when they had trouble remembering a feature in Word or Powerpoint? Does looking at it link back to Maths lessons, or forward to doing their accounts, or sideways to solving a problem they've got with something that looks completely unrelated?

The most important thing in supporting these novices is to connect past, present and future in a positive way that improves their confidence and thus their ability to learn and be productive. The highest goal in training is to develop not just effective users, but people who are creative, full of initiative and determined to stretch their knowledge to their requirements. Of course, they also need to learn something of the mechanism of the package, but actually, most people can do that by themselves if they are sure that it is possible for them, what the value of doing so will be and are given a little time.

Imagine the achievements of a group of people equipped with models of themselves succeeding and exploiting all the kit's potential to the limits – their limits. Good trainers instinctively incorporate this kind of model building into how they work. It can usually be articulated further though: in projection exercises akin to those in marketing where one asks what participants can imagine doing with a product. Marketers avoid leading their participants' thinking. Teachers and trainers lead deliberately. The goal of the projection: a positive and successful flexibility.

Now, getting back to the practical use of models in design, how do we build this approach into what users see?

'One customer recently told me that "learning to use a computer by using the documentation is like learning to drive by reading about the transmission, brakes, and internal combustion engine." ... weaving the low-level tasks that documentation provides into useful strategies is often left as an exercise for the reader,' says Gordon Meyer (Can't see the forest for the trees).

OK, so here we are offering the structural model to the user, and expecting the other two – the procedural, and what we shall call 'the user success model' – to follow.

Help systems, documentation and user interfaces should all be planned to think not only about contexts of use, but also contexts of user. Goodness me, is it so hard to suggest that people using technology might also be happy, creative and fulfilled?

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