Why Psychology? IT's all about people
Why is psychology important in IT? Simply, it's all about people, not technology.
It's easy to get caught up in the technology, its features, functions and jargon and lose sight of what it's all for and why we're doing it. Projects that are supposed to be about improving service to customers or increasing staff productivity end up being about technology, rather than the people for whom the technology is being built. Discussions between the business, IT and the vendor are all about what the technology can and can't do, not about the end users.
How many times have you heard a vendor say, 'Sorry, our application doesn't work that way'? So what can you do if that is the way you want to work? Not much — you've bought the system and you have to change to suit the way it works.
However, by focussing on the business, work and people first, we can fully understand how the business deploys its staff to create value for customers. Organisational psychologists are trained in understanding people, work, human resource management, human performance and organisational design and development. Therefore, IT is merely a tool to get the job done better.
People, psychology, and the user interface
As far as the end user is concerned, the user interface is the application. It's the only thing they see and use. They don't care which vendor it came from, how much it cost, or how big the server is that it runs on. All they care about is that it's easy to use, does what they want and doesn't get in the way.
From that perspective, successful IT solutions are about application behaviour and how it supports people's performance. Psychologists have something to say about why people do what they do, how to improve people's performance and therefore how to design interfaces that are intuitive, easy to use and align with work.
In general, technology will fail when designed and deployed purely from a technology perspective, rather than from a people and business perspective. We make extensive use of industrial / organisational psychology principles throughout our requirements and user interface design processes. (We are different from Clinical Psychologists, who are concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of people with psychological issues like anxiety and depression).
This also reflects our understanding that technology alone is not sufficient to drive behavioural change in the workplace. Organisations are complex systems and many other artefacts need to be in place to get the most out of the new technology. These could include new job roles, performance management systems, work practices, line management practices and other technology systems. Without this alignment, new technology will not sustain change over time.
Core disciplines used in PTG Global's requirements and design process
The core disciplines we use include:
- Business / organisational development
- The Balanced Scorecard™
- Organisational change and development
- Business and marketing theory and practice
- Business process re-engineering
- Activity theory
- Socio-technical systems / Systems thinking - Industrial psychology
- Cognition / information processing
- Vision / Perception
- Personality and social psychology
- Behaviour
- Skill acquisition and individual performance
- Motivation theory
- Performance management systems
- Learning and development / training
- Job, task and workflow analysis and design
- Ethnography
- Performance analysis - User interface design / human computer interaction
- Performance support systems
- User centred design
- Performance centred design
- General HCI theory and practice
Aligning the design with software engineering / development
Once we know how the design needs to work, we then draw on key concepts from software engineering. This provides us with the methods to document our deliverables in a way that IT developers know exactly what to do.
- Software engineering:
- Domain modelling
- Object oriented design / Object modelling
- Object oriented programming
- Unified Modelling Language (UML)
- ER diagramming
- State modelling
You can see that user interface design requires a large and diverse skill set to deliver a solution that works the first time and that IT can implement. These skills are not typically found in IT teams, as their focus is on code, not on people and performance.
Successful IT solutions are all about getting the right skill mix on the job. In the same way you wouldn't get your plumber to design your new office building, you need to get specialists to do what they do best.
