Archive for November, 2009

How do we design for learned helplessness?

Over thanksgiving weekend I had the experience of helping my mother reset her Facebook password.  Now, she doesn’t really know anything about computers, but she’s an intelligent woman and perfectly capable of learning if she only believed she could.  The whole conversation between us was littered with her saying she couldn’t possibly do it herself, [...]

obligatory first post

Hooray, I have a blog now!  I’ve never customized wordpress before, so I’m still trying to work out some kinks (e.g. comment errors should be displayed by the relevant form field, not on a separate page, the blog name at the top right should be a link, etc.) and the rest of the site needs [...]