Information Work: What Is Context Worth?
What’s it going to take to change? I’ve developed a law of technology adoption, which I modestly call Louderback’s Law: Unless a new technology includes breakthroughs in at least two different dimensions — without adding hardship along the way — it will not supplant and older, established one.
—Jim Louderback
For information work, context should trump technology centric factors like bandwidth, once we establish just what context is.
Coined in the landmark book Beyond Culture, anthropologist Edward Hall describes a continuum of cultural communication style, with America near the low context end, Arab medium and Japanese considered a high context culture. While Hall was concerned with national cultures, this same idea can and has been applied to cross discipline communication, and even between differing corporate cultures.
Persona and scenario based development are used by programmers because they provide a high level context within which to view the low context work tasks of writing code.
Context Does Not Depend On Advancing Technology
Products exist in a vast, often–messy environment of services, brands, cultures and competitors. But successful companies are realizing that deliberately and strategically designing products for the context in which they live can result in more imaginative, better integrated, and ultimately more humane offerings.
— Products and their Ecosystems: Understanding the power of context in product innovation
Human communication takes place at the intersection of semantics, interpretive cues, and cultural contexts. Increasing bandwidth is only a kludge, information technology allows the user to cope with the flood of bytes coming through. Data, the lowest contextual level of alphanumeric strings (words, numbers, symbols) and their placement in relation to each other, is completely dependent on bandwidth.
Cultural, interpretive and business context require less from technology but much more from designers. As important as context is, information workers don’t often see the context failures causing symptomatic problems.
Problems can start at the basic level of semantics. Stakeholder groups with different contexts nod in agreement, only to go off in different directions and later wonder what happened. One remedy is for members to compose a dictionary of critical words everyone must explicity agree upon. Defining such a simple word as document will set the limits and power the user sees in the resulting content management system.
Programmers will find direct parallels between context and what The Mythical Man–Month calles conceptual integrity. In essence software that never becomes an integrated whole, remaining a feature list or collection of requirements, fails to gain conceptual integrity. And far too many programs fail this basic test. But conceptual integrity is the real secret design–directed companies like Apple have over the competition.
Conceptual integrity is the result of contextual design, where products, software and services work seamlessly, and individual features blur together in the user’s perception. Consequently most products are constructions of parts, not integrated designs. And where discrete features don’t work together seamlessly, serious failures occur in human systems.
Death By Context Failure
According to management, the users of the existing system were technically sophisticated, tertiary–educated, and used the system frequently — probably daily. …When we got to spend time with a few users, however, I found that they were not tertiary–educated or technically sophisticated. They were primarily in clerical and secretarial roles. We also discovered that most of them could not actually use the existing application — instead, they called technical support whenever they needed to make any but the most basic changes.
—Contextual Enquiry – A Primer By Gerry Gaffney
Consider the leading byproduct of information failure in the health care field: Lawsuits. Data compiled from various sources indicate doctor–patient communication is the leading factor in up to seventy percent of suits. Length of visit and other bandwidth–type factors had little to do with how much information was exchanged. The big high–payoff information technology? Seminars teaching the difference between talking and communicating information.
A related factor is what I call stat inflation, where urgency crowds out importance, creating far more serious information failures.
Role of Computerized Physician Order Entry Systems in Facilitating Medication Errors uncovers twenty–two system failures delivering wrong medicine or dose to patients. The symptoms are usability failures, the cause is context failure. The report, published in JAMA, cites “…fragmented CPOE displays that prevent a coherent view of patients’ medications, …separation of functions that facilitate double dosing and incompatible orders” (JAMA Vol. 293 No. 10, March 9, 2005) Some dose calculation errors are common enough to be known by the slang term “death by decimal.”
Part of what Anita has learned is how aspects of the job design and aspects of the organizational context make it pretty hard for these nurses to do their jobs effectively. …And there’s no organizational mechanism to learn from these individual failures.
—When problem–solving is a problem: HBS’s Anita Tucker’s troubleshooting addresses root causes
Context failure is a loss of the reference points needed to make decisions within a system. Of creating interaction patterns mediated by technology which separate user tasks from larger objectives. Information work problems concern scope, root causes, perspective, coherency and the rules for connecting data points spit out by computers. The design crux is user attention is the new scarce system resource, not computing power. Fragmented CPOE displays scatter attention rather than focus it. Contextual inquiry techniques bridge silos, revealing the rules of attention crucial for situation awareness for any business.
Just like foreign cultures programmers (called homo logicus by Cooper) and users are separated by a common language, but different contexts of construction and use. It just doesn’t come out in stark relief until you view products, services, and interfaces from that foreign context.
DoCoMo managers were so enraptured with their state–of–the–art Internet service that they failed to notice that the long and intricate menus favored by Japanese consumers didn’t score with foreign customers who were looking for more direct and intuitive interfaces. One reason for the failure to communicate: not a single person in the senior management of the company was non–Japanese.
— Why Apple Isn’t Japanese
All you have to do is watch a busy nurse struggle to interact with a mobile monitor. Clearly designed to be a mobile unit, the wheels could not be locked, making one–handed operation impossible. The nurse had to put down the clipboard she was trying to enter data from the monitor on. With one hand she anchored the unit so enough pressure could be applied to the controls to activate them. Going back and forth between clipboard and monitor interaction continued through several cycles. Somehow the monitor’s developer never anticipated a situation when a nurse would use a clipboard with their product.
Context has been said to be worth 50 I.Q. points, but the payoff from solving the right problem in the right way is often priceless.
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Resources
- Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike explains context blindness “It’s why engineers design products ultimately useful only to other engineers. It’s why managers have trouble convincing the rank and file to adopt new processes. And it’s why the advertising world struggles to convey commercial messages to consumers.”
- “Contextual inquiry is based on three core principles: that understanding the context in which a product is used (the work being performed) is essential for elegant design, that the user is a partner in the design process, and that the usability design process, including assessment methods like contextual inquiry and usability testing, must have a focus. … For example, interviewing during a contextual inquiry study usually does not include set, broadly worded questions. Instead, the partnership between the interviewer and interviewee is used to create a dialogue, one where the interviewer can not only determine the user’s opinions and experiences, but also his or her motivations and context.” Also see Contextual Enquiry – A Primer.
- Why Apple Isn’t Japanese is a lesson in contextual blindness, with DoCoMo the cautionary tale “…Its only hope for decisive growth would have been to leapfrog into the global market. But it didn’t happen, thanks mainly to the company’s limited cultural horizons and unimaginative management.” The most difficult insight which reduces all sorts of errors in design is contextual awareness, starting with the understanding “you are not the user.”
- A simple example of contextual design: Designing a hospital gown bridging the patient’s context (modesty) and hospital worker’s context (ease of patient access.)
- The Third Age Suit is a simulator for giving young designers the context of the user their products must appeal to.
- How to Build a Better Intersection: Chaos = Cooperation road architecture saw walking and driving as utterly incompatible contexts. By bridging the contexts of architecture, driver and pedestrian psychology, accidents are reduced.
- National Campaign Aims to Curb Hospital Mistakes, Save Lives Humans are distracted by the fragmented nature of modern technologies.
- When Interfaces Kill: What Really Happened to John Denver puts human operator or pilot error in context. The paper UNDERSTANDING HUMAN ERROR IN CONTEXT: APPROACHES TO SUPPORT INTERACTION DESIGN USING AIR ACCIDENT REPORTS “… explores ways in which to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying reasons for human error from accident reports, in order to identify interaction breakdowns between operators and interfaces. It demonstrates an approach for examining contextual information of human error and deriving design ideas through an informal analysis.”
- Physicians in the MedlinePlus program are using an information Rx pad to provide context on patient condition along with medication.
- “One of the most practical yet ultimately counter–productive trends is toward the re–use of content, which usually means structuring eText content so that each chunk of data in it and each aspect of it can be extracted from its original form and redeployed in another context using dynamic publishing. This reductionist approach essentially treats the code of language as simply a quantifiable mass of data that can be carved up without losing any intrinsic value…” eText: In the beginning was the word... (by Garth A. Buchholz). Reductionism is a fine tool if you understand the limitations.
- Conceptual search engine MeaningMaster “…interprets the meaning of queries, and extracts concepts from them.” If so, it would qualify as one of the first genuine information technologies, understanding both words and their conceptual context.
- Jim Louderback’s take on why MP3 will stay and his law of tech adoption. A good guideline for operating across multiple contexts.
- PAULA ZAHN NOW transcript about NASCAR pit crew training for helicopter crews. A History of DNA Microarrays shows inkjet technology applied as a desktop manufacturing technology suited to multiple contexts.
- Apple and Netflix are oft cited as improving the cutomer experience, but before that can happen, each company first developed insights into user context.
- Some years ago a monitor manufacturer named Radius introduced the Pivot. You could rotate the Pivot’s screen between landscape and portrait mode without the image rotating. MyOrigo’s entry extends the idea to mobile devices with MyDevice. Just the sort of situation awareness TV remotes like The Kameleon could use. You could point such a remote at a device, and the context aware interface for the device and situation would appear.
- China bans Nike TV ad as national insult. Here’s the design crux of the article: “The Chinese cultural symbols are all defeated in the Nike advertisement.” Such ‘bite the wax tadpole’ moments happen when translation is mistaken for localization, which includes context. How eight pixels cost Microsoft millions points to basic issues of context aware software design beyond advertising.
- In merchandising on the web product specs can be hard to understand in real terms. A picture of the product shown against a familiar, common object puts “small” in context. Information demands relevance to decision making, so context for scanners would be different from cameras and so on. A challenge for web design, but there are ways to do it.
- High context cultures are typified by in–groups, meaning is conveyed by situation and cultural factors instead of explicit statement, and process and form are valued over time and urgency. Low context cultures are task and time centered, mutual expectation on outcomes are not as well understood, communication is explicit and direct, and individualism is expected. Both context types have advantages and problems. Making contexts visible is a key goal for information literacy programs wanting to demonstrate practical work benefits.
- The Stuff Americans Are Made Of is Joshua Hammond’s inquiry into the American cultural context. Hammond describes the contextual differences in approach to problem solving Germans, Americans, and Japanese gravitate to. Dvorak vs QWERTY keyboard is an interesting example, not of that contextual artifact path dependence as Hammond contends, but of of the cultural context which constrains our understanding of technology use and adoption. Information workers will see similar context drivers behind VHS vs Beta, and how video stores provide much needed context a focus on the product alone neglects.
- The experience of using personas at Pyra software. What is most interesting is the belief the project was on target because coders initially saw their design target as someone like themselves, yet they were still surprised. Personas have the potential for locking down the user, when often the tendency is locking down code, and recasting the user to fit implementation requirements.
- Doctor–patient communication breakdown is a common factor in a patient’s decision to file a lawsuit. Up to one fifth of malpractice lawsuits may be due exclusively to information failure of the system, with an even higher percentage as a contributing factor. Medical mistakes are placed by some as one of the top ten causes of death in America. What strikes you about medical mistakes and programs to reduce them are the information failures which happen in computing intensive environments. When problem-solving is a problem: HBS's Anita Tucker's troubleshooting addresses root causes