SAST Wingees

What is it that makes an expert, an expert?

Building expertise is a favorite here. New York Times magazine carried a superb article by the Freakanomics authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Boulder that attempts to answer the question – where does talent come from? [Lot of good links here]. The short answer to the question is – it comes from practice. They have picked a lot of material from the upcoming book The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance by Anders Ericsson:

a professor of psychology at Florida State University and the
ringleader of what might be called the Expert Performance Movement.
Ericsson and his colleagues have spent years trying to figure out how
the best pianists, golfers, soccer players, surgeons, writers,
stockbrokers, and chess players in the world got so good. How far can
talent take you? What role does selection play — and how about
practice?

One major insight for me and Priya Raju is – Ericsson’s emphasis on the need for effective ongoing feedback:

And it would probably pay to rethink a great deal of medical training.  Ericsson has noted that most doctors actually perform worse the longer they are out of medical school. Surgeons, however, are an exception. That’s because they are constantly exposed to two key elements of deliberate practice: immediate feedback and specific goal-setting. 

“Working in such a learning environment, a doctor might see more different cancers in one day than in a couple of years of normal practice.”

<Via Arun Sankaranarayanan> I can easily relate to the aspect of practice, but probably did not realize the far-reaching impact of it. However, my personal experience has been in the one area for which there is a passing reference – Goal Setting.  I have found that by having very high expectations of people that work with you, you can actually get them to exceed stretch goals.  Coupling stretch goals with ongoing feedback can help you work wonders with people that are considered no-good by other managers.  I picked this idea from the Pygmalion Effect discovered by brilliant psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson. Excerpt from Wikipedia:

In their study, they showed that if teachers were led to expect enhanced performance from some children, then the children did indeed show that enhancement. In some cases such improvement was about twice that showed by other children in the same class.

References:
1. Flashback – we had covered this expertise topic earlier, which has some additional material.
2. How to be a star at work by Robert E. Kelley   I read this excellent book a while ago. It has some great advice for becoming a star.  Technorati Tags: pygmalion effect, expert performance movement, star is made

Grahapravesam service now available from a British Church!

Yahoo reports that a British Church is offering a new home blessing service:

A new service is being offered by vicars in the north of England who give blessings to people moving to a new home.They will say prayers for each room, calling on divine assistance to protect the home and the health of those in it.

Individual prayers can be said for every room in the house: For the bedroom, clergy will lay hands on the bed and pray its occupants have a healthy sex life. In the bathroom, they will pray for good health and “give thanks for sanitation.”

Could this be the  Christian version of Grahapravesam (new home ceremony)?
<Via Priya Raju>

Thanks to Google – the WIMP User Interface is Dead

Updated: A follow-on post titled “Why the WIMP User Interface is dead” has been posted by me. Please read it for more information on this topic.

Updated on May 8, 2006:  Nick Carr writes in support of this post.  Sadagopan refutes the idea.   Ganesh, and Vinnie have posted comments against it. Looks like a good discussion is developing.

Since the advent of powerful business intelligence report-writer tools and adhoc querying tools more than 10 years ago, I have been advocating the idea that we should stop developing the information retrieval components of any Enterprise OLTP application.

Typically, OLTP applications are organized around transactions which perform CRUD operations on Business Entities.  In other words, develop only the Create, Update, Delete parts of the application and configure standard tools for the Read part of the application without writing much code in the traditional OLTP application development context. This will allow us to optimize the OLTP app for just the Create, Update & Delete parts and the  READ part for retrieval respectively, but that is besides the point.

We have been using  WIMP as the User Interface design strategy since the days when Xerox Parc and Apple Macintosh pioneered the GUI and subsequently made ubiquitous by Microsoft Windows. As everyone will attest software development costs time and money, so my argument has been that by  eliminating development on the Read part of the application, we can save time and money.

Now, there is a new twist to this strategy and that is Search. I think Search will make the WIMP interface obsolete for basic Information Retrieval/Foraging purposes.  Of course, for more advanced information retrieval applications you will use business intelligence tools.  Let’s see how this will pan out.

Google’s Onebox Search

First, I was reading Nick Carr’s interesting post today on Google’s Grand Ambition. This closing statement from Nick caught my attention and served as the inspiration for this post:

Well, there you have it. What Microsoft is trying to do with its new Duet partnership with SAP – provide a user-friendly way to tap into data from a complex enterprise system – Google is trying to do on a much grander scale. It wants to be a front end for everything. One wonders if the big application providers will really want to forfeit the user interface – and the power it represents – to Google. One also wonders whether they’ll have a choice.

From there, I landed on Dave Girouard’s interview about  Google’s  Enterprise strategy.  This particular answer from Dave caught my attention:

Yes, because it’s a development environment. Any given company may
have all sorts of information that they would like to make available,
and they can make it all keyword triggered. You could type the word
“contact” and then a name and it would go to Exchange. It’s really up
to the administrators to decide how they want to trigger it.
But the user experience—and this is really important to
us—entirely mimics how Google.com works. So, you don’t have to get
training; you can discover it over time; a friend can show you a OneBox
that they think is particularly useful. For example, one of our
partners is Oracle, and you’ll be able to look up a purchase-order in
your Oracle financial system because Google will recognize what a
purchase order number looks like. Just like Google.com recognizes a UPS tracking number. The Enterprise system will know what an Oracle
purchase order looks like, and it will insert that information right at
the top.

Let’s make a note of  “you don’t have to get training”  and “the user experience”.

Why is the Google Search Interface is so intuitive and addictive?
Al though, we see Google as a Search engine, it has actually turned the spotlight back on simple User Interfaces moving away from the bloated and cluttered WIMP interfaces we see today with Microsoft being the leading light in this approach. User Interface design is a complex field and has a lot of theory behind it.

Let us focus on 2 important Laws that guide UI designers to understand the impact of the Google Search Interface:

1. Fitt’s Law  In simple terms, this law governs the amount of  time the user takes to move from the starting point to where s/he needs to go to accomplsh the task using the navigational elements (read windows, menus, icons) provided by the UI. Now, lets call this amount of time – Fitt’s Time.

2. Hick’s Law   In simple terms, this law governs the amount of time it takes for the user to make a decision(s) amongst the myriad choices (read windows, menus, icons) presented by the User Interface to accomplish the task . Let’s call this amount of time – Hick’s Time. Now, in the Google user interface, for a basic search request, Fitt’s Time = Zero because when you launch the Google home page, your cursor is already in the text box for you to enter your search term. Additionally, Hick’s Time is also Zero because there is no decision to make as to which menu to go to or which button to press. The screen is so sparse that there is not much you need to figure out. You key in the search term and hit enter and you get the Search results. That’s it. Brilliant, isn’t it?

Of course, if you want to do more complex searches, you will have to learn more about the various Google operators and the Advanced Search page etc. There is another important concept that is a bit more subtle. This comes from the field of Information Foraging. Researchers at Xerox PARC and elsewhere, have found that the way we look for information closely mimics how he found food during our hunter-gatherer days.

Read this fascinating article by Rachel Chalmers for more information on this topic.  The important concept that emerges from this theory is “Information Scent” – as you forage for information, you pick up some scents and go down certain paths depending on how strong the scent is. You get the idea. Coming back to Google UI – the scent is extremely good because the relevance of the search results is quite good. In the absence of a semantic web, Google produces extremely good results. In sum, Google UI has Zero Fitt’s Time, Zero Hick’s Time and a strong Scent to produce a very powerful user experience.

Enterprise Information Retrieval
Coming back to the Enterprise, a typical company has tons of OLTP applications each of them having their own confusing WIMP or Text-based UI  making information retrieval a painful process.  Here is where Google’s Onebox concept could prove very powerful. You have a single search for searching all the intranet portals and use keyword-triggered searches on specific OLTP applications to bring back information.

So when you type purchase-order followed by the customer name, it triggers a query on your Purchase Order system and brings back the relevant purchase orders. Using this method, you have actually made the Fitt’s Time and Hick’s Time zero for information retrieval inside the enterprise. I think this approach will help us escape the deadly embrace of the WIMP interface and make information retrieval a no-brainer.

References:
1. Search User Interface and User Experience – A comprehensive directory of links on this subject. I found the Rachel Chalmers article mentioned above from here.

2. Acclaimed usability expert Jakob Nielsen argues that WYSIWYG is dead.  I am not yet able to see how this is going to turn out. I haven’t seen Office 2007. But in essence, Jakob is saying that the the WIMP interface is dead because there are too many features in today’s software and this WIMP interface is not working out.

Technorati Tags: User Interface Design, Infomation Foraging, Search, Usability

Dr. Moira Gunn and TechNation

I have become an avid listener of podcasts from ITConversations and have started to take a particular liking for the interviews conducted by Dr. Moira Gunn on a wide variety of topics. She also has her own website. I particularly enjoy her interviews with folks in Medical and Bio Sciences area. While listening to her interview with Dr. Larry Dossey, I was very surprised to hear that Leech and Maggot therapy was making a comeback. Her interview with Dr. Greg Stock is also a very good listen. Her interview with Bob Sutton – one of the authors of “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense” also makes for interesting listening. (I just got this book and cannot wait to read) Happy listening!! Ganesh

The emerging Voice 2.0

Sajith Sankar, specializes in the Telecom sector. He points to this O’Reilly Article that is talking about the fantastic features of Voice 2.0 like routing your calls based on your calendar info and/or your IM status. Make sure to check out the links from the O’Reilly page.