User Experience

Full Title or Meme

If the User Experience is not producing the desired results, it doesn't help to blame the User, as it is likely to be a rather ordinary human being.

Context

Buckminster Fuller provided a good description of human behavior as pretty damn stable - as in very, very hard to change. He didn't have much patience with any social engineering that was basically trying to change people that were very actively resisting change. Human's are not engineered entities. They are not intelligently design. They are just a bunch of evolutionary adaptations all the way back to the primordial ooze. So don't try to guess how they will react, just take your best guess and test your design really well.

Human Factors

Ever since machines have been implemented, the need to accommodate Human Factors to get predictable results from the machine have been clear. When airplanes were designed to be warplanes during World War II it was realized that the complexity was beyond human capability to get right consistently from one flight to another. It was only by introducing the checklist that human errors dropped to acceptable levels. Now with the proliferation of computers and even more complex tools for humans to use in situations where attention is not assured, more attention needs to be focused on how the human uses the machines.

Various writers have reflected on the importance of human factors science by emphasizing that the design of technology must cater to the information-processing (cognitive) capacities and limitations of their human users. Although the importance of human factors has been well-established and documented in science, the discipline still has a low exposure amongst engineers who design and fabricate modern-day technologies. As a result, systems are sometimes produced that exhibit little or no understanding of, or empathy with, human needs or capabilities, nor are they specifically acknowledging human foibles, failures, and propensity to error. In consequence, we witness catastrophic systems failures that can be explained by improper human-machine interaction (such as industrial accidents involving robotic manipulators; self-driving cars being involved in fatal accidents; crashes of aircraft using automation features; or incidents with oil platforms. We believe that an evaluation of this scientific discipline’s nature is required, from developmental and theoretical perspectives, to disseminate its rightful utility more fully.

Transparency

Is well defined in paragraph 58 of the GDPR.

The principle of transparency requires that any information addressed to the public or to the data subject be concise, easily accessible and easy to understand, and that clear and plain language and, additionally, where appropriate, visualization be used. Such information could be provided in electronic form, for example, when addressed to the public, through a website. This is of particular relevance in situations where the proliferation of actors and the technological complexity of practice make it difficult for the data subject to know and understand whether, by whom and for what purpose personal data relating to him or her are being collected, such as in the case of online advertising. Given that children merit specific protection, any information and communication, where processing is addressed to a child, should be in such a clear and plain language that the child can easily understand.

References

External Sites

Articles available on Medium.