Years ago P.J. Plauger made the distinction between casual users and novice users. Casual users are often very computer literate, just not frequent users of the program in question. For most people, a tax program like TurboTax or Tax Cut is used just a few times, once a year. CPAs and bookkeepers are doing some kind of tax returns almost year round, they are the expert users. Most of the rest of us may have been using each version of TurboTax for over ten years, but we are still just casual users. People don’t stay novice users forever, but they can be casual users for years. How should programs be written to help casual users?
Kathy Sierra talked about Just In Time (JIT) learning, learning as you are ready and motivated for it. As opposed to learning for some supposed future use (i.e., most school learning). So how to tell when you are ready and motivated for it? I don’t have all the answers, but I see bits and pieces in all kinds of places.
Joseph Campbell in “Hero with a Thousand Faces” talks about entrance challenges. These are barriers or obstacles that aren’t significant in themselves but prevent the totally unprepared from wandering into a situation that only luck could bring them through alive. There are plenty of waking world examples, age restrictions on driving, size/height restrictions on amusement park rides, and entrance requirements for various schools. The difficulty is making them appropriate (i.e., fair) rather than arbitrary. Age may be a mediocre way to measure maturity, but it is easy to apply and we all know what the passing score is.
The teaching materials must be right at hand. Kathy gives an example of a small booklet on one aspect of horsemanship on durable or disposable cards you take with you to the riding area. A book on the reference desk of the library doesn’t count.
A common way to handle this is graded lessons. When you have demonstrated a certain level of skill, certain lessons or teaching materials become available to you. I think with a multi-dimensional notion of skill, this could work well. I’d like to see someone apply it to the search function in help systems. Usually these returns all possible matches, many or most of which describe how to manipulate entities the casual user has never touched, has no use for, and is probably overwhelmed by. And there needs to be a way to indicate, “Show me more” and “Show me all”. The boundary between known and not yet known needs to be fuzzy and permeable, with intention you can go any where, but you are kept away from the cliffs while on a Sunday stroll.
Donald Knuth’s excellent book on TeX had the equivalent of “Here Be Dragons”, a dangerous curve sign in the margin for paragraphs you could skip on first reading. The index used bold page numbers for the definitive reference for a feature. Very helpful.
The speaker in podcast I was listening to recently talked about learning and on-line resources like Wikipedia. Serious illness can be a strong motivator. He talked about people with a high school education teaching themselves to read research papers in juried journals on a medical or other problem. Not all at once. They would start with something written for a lay audience, look up words and concepts new to them, often on-line, and then tackle a more difficult article. People with a “12th grade reading level” learned to read at a post-graduate level in this one area.
How to roll all these bits into a coherent idea is something I’m working on.