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Warning: This web at
toLearn.net/marketing/ is two years old, it's unattended, and the
links are rotting. However, in June 2000, the
server recorded over 10,000 page requests during more than 3,000 visitor sessions from dozens of
countries. Thus, I'm reluctant to take it down completely. Ricci Street | MBA 604 | marketing |
Why People Don't Use New Media by Arthur C. Graesser and Jaroslaw Wilkiewicz see Doug's note These are exciting times in the wonderful world of computerized multimedia. For a mere $3000, we can have a powerful microcomputer and dozens of software tools at our fingertips. Standard text editing software comes with a spelling checker, a grammar checker, a thesaurus, and other special-purpose facilities. We can purchase books and an entire encyclopedia on a CD-ROM disk. There are hypertext/hypermedia products that allow the user to quickly navigate through a large volume of text, pictures, and graphic images. These hypermedia products frequently include music and animated video at very high resolution (one low-priced PC-based product has a 1600 x 1200 pixel screen with 16.8 million colors). Some recent products support speech recognition, three-dimensional sound systems, and virtual reality 3D vision with glasses. With an inexpensive purchase of a modem and a telephone line, we can:
Once again, this is an exciting point in the history of information technology. It is also bewildering: there are simply too many products for us to keep up with. Consider the ideal consumer of all of these products. He (or she, of course) learns about the new products by reading dozens of magazines, trade journals, and advertisements. He is sufficiently computer literate to install various hardware and software components. He swiftly learns how to use hundreds of commands, dialogue boxes, help facilities, and other interface features. The ideal consumer is a very inquisitive person who actively generates questions and explores diverse information sources for answers. He broadcasts what he has learned to people who have similar interests. This ideal consumer is the modern renaissance man (or woman, of course). But alas it is time to return to sobering reality. The renaissance consumer is an illusion -- a fiction. The illusion may have been manufactured by the slick marketers of multimedia, or may be a shadow of our hopes and dreams. Less than 1% of the population has the knowledge and skills that are in the same arena as the renaissance consumer. When a typical consumer gets his hands on a new product, the "half-life" of using it is only a few hours (if not minutes). A typical consumer uses only a handful of products on any consistent basis. So what would it take to create a large population of renaissance consumers? The obvious answer is that it would take two things: Better products and better consumers We recently were confronted with sobering reality when we taught an honors college course on research methodology. All of the students were outstanding high achievers. All of the students were highly motivated to investigate research questions that genuinely interested them. There was one unique feature of the course: There was no textbook. Instead of a textbook, they were supposed to use computer facilities and other information sources in order to gain relevant and up-to-date information about their research topics. They had access to internet, the Web, a library with journals and books, advertisements, and assorted multimedia software. As researchers, we were interested in their use of the various media. We were surprised to learn that their use of nontraditional media was virtually nonexistent. Nearly all of them relied on the books and journals in the library. After we showed them how to use the nontraditional media, they rarely took the next step and actually used them in their research. So score 1 for paper libraries and 0 for exotic multimedia. Apparently, the computer facilities and multimedia products were not very seductive. So what's broken? After interviewing the students and analyzing the disaster, it was apparent that there were three fundamental bottlenecks. The first bottleneck The interfaces on the computer tools were inadequate The screens were congested with irrelevant details and failed to supply critical information for navigating through the software. The help facilities were difficult to access and contained useless, uninterpretable information. The software frequently requested information that the user could not understand, let alone deliver. Thus, there was the standard array of nightmares from the standpoint of the field of computer-human interaction. The software apparently was created by autistic software designers who had no understanding of the knowledge and abilities of the users. Consequently, the students quickly gave up using particular software tools, and eventually all computer facilities. The second bottleneck Poor quality information was delivered in most of the multimedia products Most of the products did have many of the "bells and whistles": pretty pictures, animation, audio messages, and pleasant music. However, the content was disappointing. The multimedia designers did not put enough thought into some fundamental questions about the users. Why would someone want to use this software? Who are the likely users? What do they already know? What would interest them? The third bottleneck Deficits in the students Most students are functionally illiterate when it comes to actively generating questions and exploring diverse information sources for answers. Students are alienated from this form of literacy. Educational curricula have traditionally emphasized passive learning rather than active learning. Students are assigned texts, they read them, and then they are tested. Genuine curiosity is hammered out of students shortly after they enter school. Educational researchers have amply documented that very few students are able to self-regulate their knowledge by asking questions that reflect their knowledge deficits and by effectively searching for relevant answers. Teachers don't teach this form of literacy, so students don't learn it. Moreover, when students do actively surf through the Web or explore a knowledge base, they tend to tread in shallow waters rather than penetrating deep knowledge. The entire multimedia enterprise is therefore confronted with some unfortunate facts about people. Most people are not cognitively equipped to be curious explorers. When they do explore, they are dabbling dilettantes rather than deep dissectors. So how do we fix the unfortunate bottlenecks? We believe there are two solutions. Multimedia design needs to be grounded in cognitive theory Now that the cognitive revolution has evolved for approximately 35 years, we have a much better understanding of how the human mind works. The field of cognitive psychology (and the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science) has developed sophisticated theories of perception, learning, memory, comprehension, natural language processing, communication, decision making, problem solving, and creativity. The accumulated knowledge is based on rigorous scientific research. This scientific knowledge about cognition needs to be integrated in multimedia design. Cognitive psychologists need to team up with designers of multimedia. The software designers need to fundamentally appreciate the currency of cognitive theory. Multimedia design needs to be grounded in empirical research It is important to collect data from bona fide users of the software, not a handful of computer hackers during the process of iterative rapid prototyping. We continue to be amazed that the journals have few good empirical studies of multimedia usage patterns. Perhaps part of the reason for this deficit is that the empirical news is not good because the technology is so unfamiliar. One of our honors students recently conducted a study that compared the textbook and the CD-ROM hypermedia version of Macaullay's "The Way Things Work." College students learned about topics (such as pianos) after reading the textbook versus the CD-ROM version. When the students were tested on what they had learned, they acquired much more information (both shallow and deep) after reading the textbook than after actively exploring the CD-ROM version. These data are not flattering news for the CD-ROM multimedia industry. However, the results are not terribly surprising to a cognitive psychologist who knows that most students are not active learners and have had little exposure to hypertext/hypermedia. Results like these underscore the importance of collecting empirical data on usage patterns. It is important to be skeptical of the marketers who make big promises about the ease and effectiveness of software products. The major challenge for the future is to integrate multimedia design with cognitive psychology and empirical research. The author of this volume is committed to meet this challenge. If we do, then we will inch closer to creating the renaissance consumer. If we don't, then the multimedia information will not end up in the heads of the consumers -- it will end up on the shelves collecting dust.
I'm on an Internet mailing list called InfoDesign Cafe. A recent posting from Brigit van Loggem of ByteRyte in the Netherlands enclosed the above essay; it's the preface from a book. I haven't read the book, but the preface reflects the bias I'm bringing to our class discussion. The book, The Psychology of Multimedia, was edited by Joachim P. Hasebrook and comes with 25 demonstrations on CD-ROM (in German). Please feel free to respond to Arthur Graesser's ideas -- especially if you disagree. I'd be happy to post your response here. Mr. Graesser gave Brigit permission to post this preface: >>By all means, you have my permission to post it. ... You might be interested in a recent grant that I received from the National Science Foundation. It involves building an automated computer tutor -- in multimedia.<< I'm going to notify Mr. Graesser that I've put his essay where you can find it more easily than on the InfoDesign-Cafe archives. To subscribe to InfoD yourself, send e-mail to: majordomo@wins.uva.nl saying: subscribe InfoDesign-Cafe. Learn more about mailing lists.
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