Developing the Required Talent, Part 2: Training Your Audience

By Geoff Hart | Fellow

This column focuses on the principles of information design, the art and science of understanding how humans process and comprehend information, and using that knowledge to develop more effective ways to communicate. Please send comments and suggestions to ghart@videotron.ca.

In my previous column in January, I described recent research on how to master any set of skills, such as the communication skills an information designer needs. In this column, I'll reframe that discussion to reveal how you can help your audience achieve comparable mastery in whatever skills you're teaching them to use. Let's start with a recap of the key points from that previous article. To excel at any skill requires deliberate practice, which has several key characteristics that distinguish it from mindless repetition. Deliberate practice must be designed to:

improve performance
make you stretch and stimulate thought
permit and encourage repetition
provide ongoing feedback

Each of these aspects has implications for how we can effectively teach our audience to perform well and possibly even to improve their performance over time.

Improve Their Performance

Whenever we perform audience analysis, one of the primary goals is always to learn what factors are most important to them. From an information design perspective, the key insights from that understanding relate to identifying the aspects of a problem that stop our audience from understanding what they must do and why and how they must do it. Based on that knowledge, we can identify the types of information we must communicate and how to communicate it in such a way that we help our audience overcome their problems.

In my previous column, I noted the benefits of asking a coach or mentor to help us identify our flaws and recommend solutions. As information designers, we take on the coach's role whenever we try to teach someone the best way to do something. Understanding the common ways that our audience fails and how to help them succeed lets us create information that allows them to avoid the former and focus on the latter.

Make Them Stretch and Stimulate Thought

Most of our audience will eventually achieve basic competence with whatever skills we're teaching or information we're providing. But we want them to do better than that—to become as expert as they want to be, or at least as expert as their situation demands. To do so, we must find ways to make them stretch beyond basic competence. Several strategies help:

Teach them what clues they should look for before, during, and after they perform a task, and the significance of those clues (i.e., why they're important).
Define specific goals (not vague motherhood statements) that they should set, and explicitly identify the steps that will lead them to each milestone along the way to those goals.
Provide indicators they can use to confirm whether they've reached each milestone, not to mention how they'll know when they've reached the goal. Also, tell them what clues might suggest that they should change tack.
Identify inefficiencies that typically slow them. Warn against these problems and suggest better (more efficient) approaches.
Suggest ways to evaluate their results and identify successes and failures. Remind them to develop a plan for doing things better next time.
Suggest additional reading to expand their knowledge, particularly if you can't solve every aspect of a problem through your information design. For example, if you're documenting desktop publishing software, provide references to books on typography, page and graphic design, and so on.

Most of us do a decent job of helping people follow a predefined path; far fewer of us devote significant effort to teaching our audience how to choose a path in the first place, how to stay on that path, and how to know when that path is no longer appropriate. We can't force our audience to do this work, so we must instead find ways to persuade them, and the best persuasion is the satisfaction (or reduction in frustration) that comes from understanding how to think about their tasks and approach those tasks with confidence.

Mastery requires intense concentration during practice, but few people have time, whether at work or elsewhere, to invest in the hours of daily practice that are required to excel. We can't force our audience to concentrate and we can't always give them enough time to do so, but we can help them focus what concentration they possess in the available time:

Help them to create, strengthen, or revise mental models of both the general context (their overall goals) and the specific context (the tasks required to reach those goals).
Teach them to think more clearly about a problem so they can adopt proven solutions—and avoid preventable errors. Provide strategies for success.
Provide enough knowledge to support their use of those strategies, but build that knowledge into a framework (a mental model) that helps them retrieve and use their knowledge.
Recommend additional reading and provide cross-references to related topics that support a task.

Neither strategies nor the knowledge required to use them effectively is sufficient by itself. Once our audience learns how to think through problems and has the knowledge they require to do so, many will begin to feel some excitement about what they're doing, and that excitement is what will make them pay more attention and concentrate on what they're doing.

Permit and Must Encourage Repetition

It's difficult to motivate our audience to practice what they've learned sufficiently long and intensively that they'll achieve mastery. Instead, we can find ways to raise their interest in working on those skills and gradually improving their skill:

Prioritize tips that increase productivity and show how those tips create free time they can use to learn other productivity-enhancing skills.
Describe an implementation process that includes time for practice and that provides the kinds of support (managerial, emotional, other) they need while they practice.

In my 2005 conference paper on improving one's editing efficiency, I described more than a dozen suggestions that had immediate and obvious payback. I had two goals in that paper: to help my readers free up enough time that they could spend more time on the really important tasks, and to provide them with enough of a reward from practicing those methods that they were encouraged to try learning more on their own. When I wrote my book on onscreen editing, I devoted several chapters to describing an implementation process that provided time and support for editors and their colleagues to learn onscreen editing. In both cases, I never forgot that few of us work in isolation. When we describe a process or teach a skill, we must always account for the upstream and downstream components (i.e., other members of the team). For example, when we teach desktop publishing skills, we must remind students of the needs of the writers and the reviewers or editors who will supply them with publishable material, as well as the needs of the printer or webmaster who will use what they produce to create final output.

Provide Ongoing Feedback

Help your audience find ways to compare their results with the desired results:

Provide models or examples of desirable results that can be emulated.
Identify and recommend best practices that should be followed because they increase the likelihood of achieving the desired results or of emulating those desirable models.
Show them how to compare their results with the models. What key factors should they look for, and what criteria indicate whether they've succeeded?
Identify what typical failures might occur, and how those failures can be avoided the next time.

There Are No Shortcuts…

There are no shortcuts, but there are always ways to encourage the work that leads to mastery. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing provides an excellent example of how this might work. This software goes far beyond traditional “typing drill” software by monitoring each person's specific mistakes and generating customized exercises that encourage repetition focused on correcting those mistakes. In addition, the software provides progress reports that show your progress, and turns much of the repetition into games that provide motivation to stick with the task and keep trying to do better. Using the software, I improved my typing speed far more than would have been possible simply by spending more hours each day typing, and in less time. How could you emulate that support in your own work?

Improve Their Performance

Make Them Stretch and Stimulate Thought

Permit and Must Encourage Repetition

Provide Ongoing Feedback

There Are No Shortcuts…

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