The Human Factor
I just finished Kim Vicente's The Human Factor, a book about improving the relationships between people and technology.
One thing I really liked about The Human Factor was that Vicente's definition of technology includes not just "hard" systems (computers and interfaces), but "soft" systems like work schedules, training programs and even regulations. Though he's an engineer, Vicente takes a systems perspective and looks at the fit between people and technology on five levels: physical, psychological, team, organizational and political.
Vicente's view is that people and technology have to be considered as component parts of a larger system:
Rather than thinking about the Cyclopean abstractions of "technology without people" or "people without technology," we can focus our attention on what matters most--the people-technology relationship as it affects human and societal needs...
Think of a system as a whole consisting of interacting parts--something that "talks" to itself. The parts can be anything: a husband and wife; the components in a car; a predator and its prey; all the animate and inanimate objects in our biosphere; the buyers and sellers in a financial market; or the set of countries belonging to the United Nations. It's the relationships that are they key. And therein lies the slippery nature of systems thinking: a relationship isn't a physical object that you hold in your hand; it's an emergent property, a gestalt, which only comes into existence when the parts it comprises are brought together and configured in a particular way.
That might remind you of something Peter wrote a few months ago
User experience is not a discipline, or an approach, it's a thing, a quality, an emergent property between a person and a product or service.
We often think of user experience as improving the fit between people and "hard" technology, especially on the physical and psychological level. Vicente talks about a much broader application of UX (or design, or human factors) thinking--everything from how physical artifacts are designed to how organizations are designed to how we address significant social problems. And on that level, I think The Human Factor really succeeds.
There are lots of good case studies in the book, but one of the main topics is preventable medical errors. There's a big push on in the US and Canada now, led by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement to reduce medical errors (IHI has fully embraced systems thinking). The problems leading to medical errors cut across all five of Vicente's levels. Some of them are solved by hard technology--like a new anaesthesiologists' cart with color-coded tubes and forcing functions to help prevent doctors from administering the wrong anaesthetic. Other problems, like wrong site surgery, require soft system solutions.
What the case studies show in total is that that many of our problems with technology--whether it's everyday frustration with an in-car GPS or an airline crash--is the result of looking at those interacting parts (people, hard systems, soft systems) in isolation rather than as a whole.
Which sounds like an obviously conclusion--especially if you're "down with the user experience"--but it's not. If I were tasked with making air travel safer, I think I would be lucky to make it as far as Paul Fitts did. But the reason flying is one of the safest modes of travel (as shown in this chart) is because of a host of innovations throughout the system--undertaken by all players--designed explicitly to encourage safety. (Vicente discusses both Fitts's work and the airline safety movement in the book.)
Anyway, this book and some client work have given me a crash couse in system thinking. I'm working my way through The Fifth Discipline, probably the most accessible work on the topic right now.
