In 1956 the educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom released a book that changed education, and curriculum design worldwide. He presented a taxonomy of educational objectives, aiming for a more holistic education for students. Bloom’s work, specifically his cognitive hierarchy, laid the foundation for a lot of educational reform. Bloom argued there are six levels of domain expertise, and his concern was that education systems at the time were rooted firmly on knowledge, the lowest level. Anyone who has ever had to memorize information for an exam would agree.
The objectives are a hierarchy showing your ability with a specific domain. Informally you can think of them like this…
- Knowledge — The ability to recite lists, rules, formulas, specific facts.
- Comprehension — The ability to understand the reasoning behind said rules/facts, and translate and re-state where necessary
- Application — The ability to apply acquired knowledge in new situations to produce solutions
- Analysis — The ability to recognize patterns, question reasoning, distinguish facts from inferences.
- Synthesis — The ability create new knowledge, methods, formulas, based analysis of problems.
- Evaluation The ability to create multiple solutions and select the most effective in a given situation
When I was a full time researcher in Computer Science education, this taxonomy helped me gauge the effectiveness of exams. At the time most programming exams focussed on knowledge (e.g. “how do you get the length of a string”), or the marking system rewarded rote-learning (e.g. “+5% for a for-loop, +15% for an if-statement”). Looking at exam with these objectives in mind helps highlight problems. It can be also very useful when interviewing candidates claiming to have expertise in an area.
These days the taxonomy helps me in other ways.
What level to work at
User Experience designers should see parallels here between the levels they are required to work at in a given project, and the level of knowledge they get to use. For example “Make this sign-up form usable” is usually just the application of a few rules, whereas “Help my business gain more customers” requires the ability to generate multiple ideas and evaluate which is most suitable for this challenge.
When working for clients I know I’m far more effective when working at the synthesis and analysis levels than when I’m lining up text boxes, and stacking radio buttons to make an already broken form a little less painful. My mentor John Wood used to call this type of work “painting the corpse”.
Tips ‘n’ tricks
Eoghan recently posted about his issues with lists that promise to make you a better designer. I agree with him. I have no problem with check lists that serve as a memory aid, but these are a different sort to what is usually seen online.
I have issues with the usual “X ways to do Y” style lists, because at best they offer primitive knowledge that people rote learn, turning them into drones who say “Use gradient for modern effect. Always center your layout. Always use sans-serif fonts. Red is a good call to action colour”. And at worst they’re just bullshit begging for a Digg.
6 Comments
But the arrows are the giveaway. You can’t skip straight to the right hand side.
Many ‘disruptive’ artists (from Picasso to Prokofiev) have had a classical, disciplined training before going out and breaking the rules that they then knew existed.
Documented idioms and checklists of the state-of-the-art are about as close to a formal education in the medium as most will get. Yes, it’s watercolour evening classes, but probably a necessary evil for the 99.9% of the population that don’t have the UX designer genius gene.
How would you help people who do aspire to push their influence to the right hand side? Better tools? Better education? More reading? Ignore old browsers?
(I follow a few designers and all they seem to debate is which of Smashing Magazine and IE6 is the worse evil - this continues to be of educationally low value.)
Or does one just need to accept one doesn’t have the gene?
Posted by James Pearce at 4:31 am on 15 September, 2009.
Hey James,
Thanks for the comment. So your question, if I understand you correctly, if is “Des, if you’re saying these lists are useless, then how should people learn to study design/ux/information architecture/whatever. ”
So in reply,
Firstly, My main issues with the lists is that they offer idioms without explanation.
In my field it’s important to know WHY the idioms exist. For example, if the rule is “NEVER have a ragged left edge on text” , it’s important to understand why. That’s how you’ll know when to break the rule (as Picasso etc did). In this case a ragged decreases readability. WHY? The human eye can rapidly perform a saccde to a fixed point, and has muscle memory, so as you read through the paragraphy your eye immediately flicks back accordingly to where it knows the start of the line will be.
However if you’re laying out web forms, are plenty of times when a ragged left edge is acceptable, so you have to understand the conditions of the rule, before you can go breaking it.
I personally believe that a better education is the solution. Most designers, especially UX ones, are self taught.. This isn’t a problem, however being self taught means you need to be selective about your resources. I’d wager than someone who read 3 books on usability and design (Say “Don’t make me think”, “About Face” and “Designing Interfaces”) is far better equipped to design than someone who read 300 lists of tips. Basically if you’re genuinely going to spend time learning something, why not choose a good source that is geared towards moving up the hierarchy of objectives.
I guess I’m making a plea for people to spend their time reading meaningful resources. Smashing Magazines isn’t all bad, but they occasionally create some truly awful “must have” lists.
Posted by Des Traynor at 12:32 pm on 15 September, 2009.
Hi Des, good comment.
No, I’m not some sort of Smashing Magazine zealot - quite the opposite! - but I wanted to know how you felt people should make the leap you describe, and to transcend the drudgery of web mechanics and clichés.
(Apart from practice, practice, practice…)
Which you did.
(But you still need to fix the ‘just before lunchtime’ thing
)
Posted by James Pearce at 4:09 pm on 15 September, 2009.
Painting a corpse is one way to put it. Polishing a turd is another!
This post reminds me of the conscious competence learning matrix. Basically it says that there’s four steps to learning something fully. They are:
1. Unconscious Incompetence
2. Conscious Incompetence
3. Conscious Competence
4. Unconscious Competence
This matrix outlines how humans learn. Basically, it highlights the steps taken during the learning phase of anything new. These four steps can be explained as:
1. We’re unaware that we don’t know how to do it;
2. We’re aware of it, but we still don’t know how to do it;
3. We know how to do it but we have to concentrate really hard to do it;
4. We know how to do it and can do it instinctively without thinking.
It’s not exactly what you’ve outlined here, but it’s from a similar line of thinking and I thought it was worth mentioning.
Posted by Iarfhlaith Kelly at 12:33 pm on 16 September, 2009.
Hey Iarfhlaith,
Yeah, that’s the whole “unknown unknowns, known unknowns, unknown unknown, known knowns” argument that Rumsfeld was lambasted for. He was right.
In educational circles it’s called the “5 orders of ignorance”. Definitely worth a mention here.
Des
Posted by Des Traynor at 12:39 pm on 16 September, 2009.
probably the wrongest place to be asking this question - but where else? do you have a personal blog or something i can subscribe to? or anything like that i can access? i like how you write and i’d like to be inspired on a daily basis. or at least regularly.
Posted by sophia at 6:04 am on 10 November, 2009.
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