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IT Psychology - Shrink for your IT system

The Performance Technologies Group

Category: psychology | Author: James Breeze | Date: 04/05/2006

Summary

Why on earth would a psychologist work in IT? Does IT have mental health problems? Of course it does, most of the time!

Surely you’ve used technology that is just too plain hard?  Or that seems to have a mind of its own?  Or it works one minute, then doesn’t the next?  Or you can’t get it to do something, then the local guru comes over and it suddenly works the right way?  Infuriating, isn’t it! Perhaps it’s us that needs regular counselling so we don’t go postal at the PC!!

Many IT projects fail because end users (that is, us) have usually been forgotten or, worse, ignored. The design process is usually trial and error, not a rigorous science.  In this paper we’ll explain why psychologists (scientists) are in fact extremely useful members of your IT project team.

As far as mental health goes, IT always creates headaches for end users when it doesn’t do what they expect it to.  It also causes anxiety for the programmers who are left guessing because they are given a set of incomplete requirements of what the business person thinks they want.   And the person who paid for the new system is depressed because it is not generating a return on their investment!  It’s enough to drive anyone around the bend!

 

IT is actually all about people, in fact, it’s only about people.

Technology is a means to an end, and if people don’t, won’t or can’t use a system to get their job done better, then it’s all a big waste of money.  You’ve all seen it — a video recorder that needs a 6 year old to program it, the difficult to read EPG, and IT systems in your office that double your work load instead of halving it.  What can we do about all this IT that just doesn’t seem to work?

IT exists because it augments what would normally be done by people.  If we don’t understand how people would normally do things (i.e. go about their work) and then make the IT conform to those requirements, then IT is destined to fail.

 

So what exactly does psychology have to do with all this?

Psychologists, specifically industrial / organisational types, are expert at observing and documenting people’s work activities, identifying causes of high and low performance and identifying causes of variance between people.  Most importantly, psychologists can diagnose with confidence why people do what they do, and why they don’t do what we’d like them to do.

If you agree that IT systems are about helping people do their work better and faster than before, then you simply must start an IT project by first understanding the nature of people and the work being performed.  And this is more than just having a quick look at the workplace or getting people in a room to ask them what they want.  You need to understand the goals, activities and decisions they are performing and how this relates to business strategy.

Further, if you consider that the introduction of a new IT system is actually about change management, then it can be used to change people’s behaviour and align it with strategy.  The way IT systems work directly guides the way people behave — you can either make it harder or easier for them, based on how well the user interface of the system behaves in relation to the strategy.  The way it works is the only thing that people use at the end of the day.  No-one really cares about the database or the size of the server.

However, if you don’t take this approach, then your system ends up behaving in ways that bear no relationship to business strategy, and worse, no relationship to the way people must work to meet KPIs.  You can easily see how it is the way people behave that is a primary driver of organisational success.  After all, it is people that deliver the service, sell the product and engage with customers.

So, in IT, imagine if you could:

  • Scientifically diagnose the root causes of human performance issues and needs,
  • Understand and measure how people do things optimally, and
  • Predict what they are going to do.

That sounds like it should be enough to work out exactly how to design something that will work and be usable, right?  Not so! Psychology and science also teaches us that we need to have a justifiable and repeatable process to produce the right and consistent results from a given set of inputs.  Otherwise, different people could take the same requirements and produce completely different user interface designs.  Hang on, isn’t that what happens now?

It’s a myth that having different designers come up with different designs is a good thing (see our other paper, Debunking the myths of IT development).  What this really means is that there are no standards for good design.  Imagine if all the car makers created different designs for the dashboard or pedal layouts, just to differentiate from their competitors.

Psychologists are very good at creating standardised processes for managing human behaviour and learning. They can work out how people go about their work, find improvements and use techniques to train others.  This can even be done for the design process — something that many think can only ever be a creative, individual and situation-dependent process.

In the same way, there are established techniques for effective training to maximise learning (see our other paper on Cognitive load theory and user interface design), psychology, has allowed us to work the best way to repeatably and justifiably produce usable and consistent designs that match the way people think and behave to get things done.  By mapping how people make decisions and using a scientific process that translates these requirements into a design that works first time, we can create a technology / user interface blueprint that won’t cause everyone mental health problems!

 

Conclusion

So next time someone tells you that it’s all about IT, take a moment to think about what IT is actually for.  It’s for us — people — to get things done better than before.  IT is a means to an end, and its design and development starts and ends with people.  Psychologists know a thing or two about people and how to improve performance and satisfaction.  In the same way that you get an architect to design your new house instead of the guy that pours the concrete, you need a psychologist to design a system that will work for people.

 
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