Media: UIE looks at what makes Change unpopular and designing to avoid this Distress

"Designing Embraceable Change" starts with a long story about a company changing its intranet overnight. It illustrates well what not to do if you want to keep your company ticking over. However, Jared Spool makes a different point - he looks in general at why some changes are acceptable and some produce resistance.

As he says: 'Understanding why change is sometimes embraced and sometimes resisted is critical to successfully introducing new designs.'

He points to an understanding of the Knowledge Gap to help us explain why users sometimes resist change. Two points are important in the knowledge space: Current Knowledge, which is what users know when they sit down at the design, and Target Knowledge, which is what they need to know to complete their task. He then examines the intranet debacle in this light.

Associated Link: UIE: Designing Embraceable Change

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