Dave’s Whiteboard

The first of Gagne’s nine events of instruction is “gain attention.” The word “attention” takes me back to grade school, where only the principal used the P.A. system (it was a much simpler time).

Ordinary messages, like recruiting boys for the safety patrol or girls to be hall monitors (it was a more stratified time, too), were made by student versions of town criers who went from classroom to classroom. In my memory, it seems they always began, “Your attention please!”

More of a demand then a request, but never mind.

Steve Higgins and Shelly Batts at Of Two Minds mentioned GraphJam, the place where pie charts meet Lolcats. GraphJam invites people to create charts and upload them. Readers don’t comment, per se; they submit TPS reports.

Some of the entries only remind you that tragedy’s easy but comedy’s hard. Still, in the right circumstances, you can apply the idea and gain attention more successfully than the kid making announcements for the pep rally.

Bullhorn photo by Nate Beaty.
Knife and Snapple charts from GraphJam.com

From the marketing blog One Degree, a great example of performance problems in action.

Carolyn Gardner asks Why Do 9 Out of 10 Consumers Abandon Transactions? To help answer, she reports that 90% of people responding to a survey reported some issue that caused them to abandon an online transaction.

Recognize any of these?

• 37% reported difficult navigation
• 29% reported insufficient, incorrect or confusing information
• 22% reported endless loops blocking transactions
• 21% reported the search function not working properly
• 20% were automatically kicked off the page

Here’s Gardner explaining the problem to her readers:

Let’s consider the keyword arrival of a consumer visiting an online store I’ll call Bikinis-R-Us. Now let’s pretend it’s someone searching for a red polka dot bikini.

Great, now apply this intent to find a red polka dot bikini to the walk-in arrival of a consumer visiting one of Bikinis-R-Us brick and mortar locations.

In this scenario, it’s kind of like imagining someone walking in to a store with a post-it on their forehead reading “I want a red polka dot bikini�.

You can’t train your customers in the “right way” to use your site. You can, however, take a cue from people like Thomas Gilbert and consider the online transaction as a performance system.

You ask things like: do customers have the information they need when they need it?

Or, does the site provide the tools and incorporate the processes they need to find the product or service, learn the price or procedure, compare options?

One tool for getting there: develop some likely scenarios (”I want to buy a gift card.” “How much is shipping?” “I need a table for the landing, but it can’t be more than 16 inches wide.”) and have people who weren’t involved with the system try and work through them.

Doesn’t have to be full-blown usability testing. But it’s astounding what developers and managers can learn when they have to watch people grappling with some digital reality. As Maurice Hamoy of Inset Systems said,

It’s like watching a horror movie you’ve seen before….You know they’re heading for big trouble. You want to be able to yell at them, “No! No! Don’t go in there! You’ll never get out!”

Hamoy’s “big trouble” is actually an opportunity — but it doesn’t show up at the door saying that’s what it is.

Frustration screen image by Nick Bonadies.

Neuroscientist Christopher deCharms earlier this year at TED gave this brief (4 min.) talk showing how fMRI can provide real-time images of the brain at work.

(Note to self: remember in WordPress to turn off the visual editor when pasting code into a post, like “embed this video” from TED.)

Sharp Brains has a post by John Medina about his book, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Medina is, among other things, a developmental molecular biologist and director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research.

I like the way he writes:

If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a cubicle.

His apparently common-sense rules summarize in everyday language what brain research reveals. Here are a few of the rules along with my take on implications for training, learning, and working.

Exercise boost brain power.

• So why do workers or students sit up to eight hours a day?
• And why so often do I?

We don’t pay attention to boring things.

• For classroom presentations, my Law of Focus says people take ten minutes of break per hour, whether you give it to them or not. Medina’s not as optimistic.

We are powerful and natural explorers.

• I once saw the terrible twos described as “first adolescence.” A child who can now walk, talk, and express herself confronts a world with unexpected potential and unexpected obstacles.
• As Medina argues, this describes how our brains develop — both in individuals, and in the species.

I don’t think any of the rules are all that startling. Maybe their best value is summarizing in everyday terms what brain research has found. In other words, it’s not learning styles or MBTI profile or top ten tips for moving your cheese (or someone else’s). This is how people’s brains do what they do. Could be some advantage in putting that knowledge to work.

Brain photo by zen sutherland.

Common Craft (which means Lee and Sachi LeFever) uses, as they say, a simple format and real-world stories to make sense of complex ideas.

Laura Jeffrey at knowledgework posted this Common Craft explanation of Twitter:

Between this, and comments from people like Alan Levine and George Siemens, I’m going to give Twitter a try (though I can be a bit distractable). (My ID, oddly enough, is dave_ferguson.)

Laura’s post reminded me of other effective Common Craft videos, like those on social bookmarking, RSS, and online photo sharing.