Nilo Sarraf

One of the most fascinating studies in psychology is the condition of Learned Helplessness. The first time I ever heard of this study was back when I was pursuing my bachelors in Cognitive Psychology. This study, along with its results and possible implications, fascinated me and has had me pondering how this could affect our everyday behavior, decision-making, and ultimately our future.

The father of Learned Helplessness, Martin Seligman, initially performed his study on dogs. However, the outcome was so fascinating that his lab ended up doing follow up studies in order to examine its affects on humans as well.

Just to give you an overall view, here is Wikipedia’s definition:
“… a condition of a human person or an animal in which it has learned to behave helplessly, even when the opportunity is restored for it to help itself by avoiding an unpleasant or harmful circumstance to which it has been subjected. Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depression and related mental illnesses may result from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation.”

In plain English, when an individual learns that something is not possible, he/she will believe this, while feeling helpless, for ever! Well, ‘for ever’ sounds too strong but I am just trying to make a point here. Individuals presented with situations where they  believe that they have no control over, subsequently, will experience stress, helplessness, and withdrawal. This affect increases when the situation presents unpredictable events too.

Now, imagine if a web/mobile interface (a site or an app) presents users with situations of ‘learned helplessness’. What would the outcome be? In other words, imagine an interface presenting users with situations of unpredictability and loss of control. Not only would this make users feel like failures but it would also make them feel helpless. The amazing part is that not only would the user learn helplessness but, according to this study, even their audience would learn helplessness too. To clarify, when it comes to that specific interface, whoever watches the user and whomever the user shares the ‘story of helplessness’ with would learn being helpless too … even if they never themselves used that specific interface. This is a serious outcome that a ‘web-creator ‘would probably never find out!

So, what is the remedy? I strongly believe that raised awareness among web-creators is definitely a first step. Often times, as creators, we have hard time seeing and understanding how a user would truly interact with the web. Therefore, thinking like a user, although extremely difficult, may helps us create solutions that actually end up solving a problem, as opposed to creating additional problems for the users.

Disclaimer: I am sure many UX:ers, such as Donald Norman, have already made this connection and have extensively addressed it. I just had to talk about it too, as this topic fascinates me and feels close to the heart!

On March 1, the founders of Zurb came to Hacker Dojo to give one of their most exciting talks at our ‘IxD for Devs’ class!  Generously, they shared some of their most valuable thoughts and experiences with over 50 developers at the Dojo. The house was packed and the energy was high. Everyone was excited to have the Zurb team on board. Bryan, Jeremy, and Dmitry gave it all they had. Thank you, Guys!

In the first part, they talked extensively about how they manage to transform ideas into tangible practical stepping stones by completing the circle of idea-transformation through repeating these three steps:

1. Deep team collaboration
2. Reiterating sketches and expanding on the core idea
3. Constant user-feedback through established existing networks

Skillfully, and with real-world examples, they showed their audience the ‘Zurb-way’ of tackling and addressing one of the most challenging dilemmas that many companies seem to be facing these days: the gap among Strategy, Design, and Development..

The second part got even more exciting, as they got everyone dive into the ‘Zurb-way’, by having them practice these steps. The whole room was on fire, as each team got into brainstorming and sketching ideas energetically. It was quite a revelation to watch as each idea transformed into tangible one-minute pitch. Now, that felt good!

To sum up, and in their own words, their talk was about:
“How many product ideas were built, but never really made it to market? A little of that is OK, but why does it happen so much? We don’t believe it’s because of bad ideas. We believe it’s because a holistic approach to design for people is missing inside and outside your organization.

We’re going to avoid an abstract talk in favor of a practical look at the design process and the design techniques everyone should know how to use. We’ll show you how we screwed it up on one of our products and how we got it right on the next one. A few techniques we’ll cover are:

• Sketching to sell and open up the idea
• Creating a product blueprint with proof points
• Finding team overlap between Marketing, Design, Engineer functions

This people-centered, holistic approach to design makes Apple and other innovative companies what they are today. It has helped our 150+ clients create more than a billion dollars in market cap. We’ll end the talk with a hands-on example.”

Human brain structures and organizes the information received in order to retrieve information easily at another point in time. Information Retrieval, perhaps one of the oldest disciplines in Information Technology and Science, was most likely first defined by Mooers (1950):

“Information retrieval is the name of the process or method whereby a prospect user of information is able to convert his need for information into an actual list of citations to documents in storage containing information useful to him.”

One of the main goals of information retrieval is to promote easier access and facilitate search abilities of the information stored within a system. Initially, researchers mainly investigated laboratory framework, also known as system-oriented research (Jarvelin, 2007). In system-oriented research, the main metrics of measurements are precision and recall of the systems. In other words, the user never initiates retrieving information.

ID for Devz – Jan 2011

Continuing with our ID for Devz series at Hacker Dojo, this time,  Jon Hull,  David Snyder, and I mainly talked about User Research and User Behavior.

For my part, I covered ‘Informal Guerilla User Study; a quick and easy way to get useful user feedback on your app’. We had many enthusiastic devz show up, eagerly wanting to learn more about their users…

ID for Devz – Nov 2010

Sharing knowledge and insights on Consistency, Human Error, and Error Messages in web design at Hacker Dojo, together with Jon Hull and David Snyder. We try to hold these classes every month.

For the whole deck on Consistency, see here: