Feedback

Give Feedback

An excellent way to help Humans improve their performance is to provide feedback. Well-designed systems tell people when they are doing well and when they are making mistakes.

• An important type of feedback is a warning that things are going wrong or, even more helpful, are about to go wrong. Our laptops warn us to plug in or shut down when the battery is dangerously low. A Tesla will alert a driver on a trip whether there is enough power left in the battery to reach the destination, and if not, it will alter the GPS directions to include a stop at a charging station. Health alerts can tell you all sorts of things, increasingly in real time. But warning systems have to avoid the problem of offering so many warnings that they are ignored. If our computer constantly nags us about whether we are sure we want to open that attachment, we begin to click “yes” without thinking about it. The warnings are thus rendered useless.
• Feedback can be improved in many activities. Consider the simple task of painting a ceiling. This task is more difficult than it might seem because ceilings are usually painted white, and it can be hard to see exactly where you have painted. Later, when the paint dries, the patches of old paint will be annoyingly visible. How to solve this problem? Some helpful person invented a type of ceiling paint that goes on pink when wet but appears white when dry. Unless the painter is so colorblind that she can’t tell the difference between pink and white, this solves the problem.