Beware the User Agenda
Where it all started

Rich collaboration

My work and experience in the online space is exciting and fulfilling because of my close collaboration with two very talented and creative professionals, Renée Todres and Heather Schoenheimer.

Renée is the Managing Director of Tipping Point, a digital services company with extensive experience in e-marketing, website design and innovative web-based business solutions.

Heather is the CEO of HS Consulting, and a specialist consultant in HR, Learning Development, Organisation Capability and Leadership Curricula.

Back

Before the 'user', when things seemed simple...

In the early 1990s, I worked with a great team of engineers on the design of a development and delivery environment for online information and computer-based training.

The Web was in its infancy, Mosaic was still over the horizon and Windows Help was yet to emerge.

They were interesting times but perhaps they were most interesting because of the assumptions everyone was making about online user behaviour.

• Instructional designers led out with their irrefutable confidence that they could control online learners.
• Technical communicators designed step-by-step paths through information bases convinced that users would read concepts before procedures, and that they would read whole procedures.
• Methodologies like Information Mapping converted all and sundry to a beliefs about the logical, well-controlled behaviours of information users.

The implicit paradox

Right from the start, none of this made sense to me. I'd emerged from the NSW State Education System recognising that children resisted anything that smelled of extended concentration and that adults seemed to do much the same

Nevertheless, there I was designing a computer-based training tool and developing computer-based training (CBT) - seemingly in bed with the devil.

Well, not quite. Much to the shock and despair of colleagues in the States who believed that they could 'control' the online learner, I designed CBT modules that allowed learners to enter at any point and leave at any point.

For me, it was a matter of 'the most effective learner is the learner in control.' You simply had to support learner behaviours and design online learning around self-contained 'molecules of meaning'.

When I hit the world of the internet in 2000, shock, horror, people STILL thought that users were impressionable little blobs who were just waiting for the branding, widgits and words that the web would throw at them.

Turn on the lights!

I wrote my first article about the user agenda in 2001 - my first explicit challenge to the conventional thinking among all but a very few of my peers. The challenge of this article is as relevant and as discordant today as it was in 2001.

Feeling comfortable about your online designs? Well... Beware the User Agenda (pdf, 149 KB)

Beware the User Agenda was published in Best Practices, Center for Information-Development Management, Vol 3, Number 5, Denver, USA, October 2001.

In 2002, Elizabeth Pek and I co-authored a follow-up user agenda article, Building Success on the User Agenda, that explored techniques for analysing and leveraging the agenda in internet design. The second article was also published in Best Practices, Vol 4, Number 2, Denver, USA, April 2002.

Back