8 – DESIGNING FOR EXPERTISE

Publisher Summary The people who will engage in the application of the new products are in many instances more than users; they are practitioners of trained skills. They are professionals who contribute their knowledge to the application of the new products and systems as they utilize these to accomplish their goals. Expertise is rooted in a particularly deep-level understanding of a domain of practice. This understanding utilizes explanations and reasoning strategies that are extracted from a conceptual model of the domain, constructed and continuously consulted, tested, and updated by the domain expert in the course of practicing in the domain by engaging in activities in order to achieve goals. The conceptual model takes the form of an abstract representation. Understanding how practitioners make decisions and formulate plans for action is a prerequisite for designing systems that facilitate domain expertise in context. This chapter discusses designing for expertise. It illustrates that expertise is comprised of many factors and relies on the training and experience of practitioners in their domain. Expertise represents a convergence of knowledge, skills, and experience that results in competence—the ability to make appropriate decisions and assessments with regard to the situations at hand. Research on expertise is concerned with issues that arise in the course of work with representations in real settings—where people trained to different levels of proficiency work at tasks to different levels of skill. It focuses on factors that determine the knowledge and performance of experts—in roles as operators of artifacts and systems, and as stakeholders that face the complexities posed by novel technology.