Norman, Donald A.
Chapter 1: The Psychology of Everyday Things
The chapter discusses common household objects and other items and why some of them are so strange to us. He breaks it down into a view items namely: visibility, affordances, models, maps and feedback. He explains what each of these are and how they help us to understand and item and its uses. Without solid foundations in these items can seem quite confusing and we may have no idea how they work without deep investigation.
I enjoyed this chapter quite a bit and was amused at how the author talked about different devices such as phones, VCRs and doors and how people do not know how to use them properly. The most interesting part to me was the pictures of devices that cannot exist.
Chapter 2: The Psychology of Everyday Actions
In this chapter the author talks about peoples views on actions and how they perceive things that happen to or around them. He starts with simple things such as how people feel when they inappropriately blame themselves for an action and then transitions into how this affects the ideas of learned and taught helplessness. He then talks about the seven stages of an action: choosing a goal, forming intentions, specifying the action, executing the action, perceiving its effects on the world, interpreting new state, evaluating outcome. He then transitions this into the idea of gulfs of evaluation, which is the idea of how much effort you must put into figuring out if your action satisfied your goal and the problem this creates.
This was a very interesting chapter from a programming point of view. It is interesting to think that instead of blaming myself for actions I should interpret this as a thought process of, did I really make a mistake or is this just a poor design decision. I remember occasions when this has come up and I was able to reflect on which ones I handled correctly and which I did not. I also think the idea of the gulf of evaluation is totally true and that you can drown in trying to figure out if what you did worked correctly.
Chapter 3: Knowledge in the Head and in the World
In this chapter the author discussed how memory works and how people think about things. Essentially, he talked about how memory can be tricky and how we can do tasks without thinking about them. He claims there are two kinds of knowledge: in your head and in the world. Knowledge in the world is the knowledge that you don't need to think about it just comes as being part of the environment (such as typing) and knowledge in your head are the things that you recall because you've learned them. He then talks about memory and the psychology behind it such as how people can only typically store seven things. He also talked about reminders and how they work, how you need a reminder that is visible and representative.
This chapter was quite interesting in that it talked about one of the fundamental aspects of human life that psychologist talk about all the time. Memory is a tricky thing and not many psychologists know or completely understand why it works. However there is a few aspects of it that are not entirely clear or cut and dry that we struggle to understand. I find it inherently interesting that the brain has to learn about itself and the idea that we have different ways to remembers ideas. One thing that I kind of disagree with here is that, you can get your memory to be better than seven items, there are lots of simply memory tricks that one can practice to make your memory much better, its the idea of chunking.
Chapter 4: Knowing What to Do
In this chapter we discuss the idea of how messages work and the constraints associated with them. The author talks about how different kinds of messages display different constraints and how good design should have constraints that are appropriate and lead the user to a logical way to use them. He also talks about how sound is a large factor in determining constraints of a sound and he argues that much of them are very intuitive however they can display largely different purposes. In fact in some cases sounds are built into items to confirm to the user that they are working correctly such as the click on a door when it slides shut. He claims that sounds can play a useful role in designs that seem rather confusing.
This chapter was rather good in that it presented more really good ideas about how things should be designed logically and how their design is geared towards users. For each of his arguments of design and each of the idea he talked about was backed up with a lot of really useful examples that brought the problem into perspective and made it a lot easier to see what he was talking about. I think my favorite part was talking about how intuitive of an idea switches are. The thing that bugs me the most about this is that if you have multiple switches controlling the same thing then you might be turning a light on when you flick it down (meaning off).
Chapter 5: To Err is Human
In this chapter the author discusses two main points, first that errors made by humans are one of two different phenomena and second that sometimes design of things shapes our view of how errors in it are handled and encountered. First he says that human errors in action are essentially two types: slips and mistakes. He gives very humorous examples of each most of which have to do with how mistakes are things that have a larger effect and are in some cases nearly impossible to prevent, and slips are small mistakes such as mistyping a word in this blog and having to backspace to correct it. (I do this all the time BTW, just in typing this I have done it three times now). He then talks about how different items are designed and how in some cases the designs are error prone or again (calling back to earlier chapters) the items are designed for how a user SHOULD use them not how a user WILL use them. He brings up lots of good points about how errors occur and how design can help to alleviate errors all together.
I think this was probably one of my favorite chapters from either of his books that we are reading (Everyday and Future things) simply because of all the great examples that he gives. It is interesting that in reading something like this I would think to myself, I don't think I've ever done that, when likely I have made all the same errors as the people he is referring to. I think the notion is also interesting that design of things has as much to do with errors associated to it as do the ways in which people use them. One of the examples he gives is the Nintendo system and while I never had many problems using mine it was because long before I got one I was able to see other friends use them over and over and had learned from all their mistakes. I think that in general many things are designed so that you DO NOT use them incorrectly but when someone simply does not understand or tries something different is when there are major design issues.
Chapter 6: User-Centered Design
In this chapter we look at the idea of how design decision are made and who they are made for. The author discusses many different devices as he normally does but then discusses how they are designed by engineers and many times really only for engineers. Some designers never really consider that in the end an average person is going to be using the item and a lot of times this person is not going to have any sort of background in that kind of device. It harkens back to earlier chapters when he talks about items should not be designed based on how the user SHOULD use the item but rather how they WILL use the item. He talks about how designers need to consider the emergency moments how a user will not think and simply act and try to prevent as many of these situations as possible. The best example he gives is one he has done personally with sticking a metal object in a toaster, even if he was careful there is still a chance he could get a bad shock and really injure himself.
This chapter, while long, did have some really good examples. The toaster example was really good for him to put here because I am willing to bet that it hits close to home for a lot of people. In fact the more you look at it there are a lot of items that aren't designed with users in mind and they really could harm people quite easily. We have had to go so far as to put instructions "do not attempt to stop chainsaw with hands" because of stupid hasty things people have tried to do. I think that while devices should be designed with the user in mind there needs to be a way for companies to "sign off" designs and show that they have tried to protect the user as much as possible so when people just really do do something completely stupid with a product their good intentions and weeks of effort aren't thrown back in their faces and they are sued.
Chapter 7: User-Centered Design
In this final chapter Norman talks about issues very similar to the ideas he talks about in Design of Future Things. He also gives a large cover of all the material in the book and talks about how all these principals are properties needed for good design with the user in mind. He boils it down to a few items: knowledge in the world and head, simplification of tasks, making things visible, get correct mappings, exploit constraints, design with error in mind, standardization. Each of these he argues is needed for a successful desgin but also a design for the user not for the creator. He gives examples of how each applies and then talks about how one of the principals applies or could be applied to each situation. He then ends by talking about the future design of everyday things and talks about the Smart House example.
This was a neat chapter, and although rather long for its material did provide a good conclusion for the book. In fact, he uses some of the best examples here and covers each topic very well. It is interesting how in the end designing future everyday things is very similar to the principals covered in his other book. There is a lot to be said about designing strictly for the user and if someone were able to come up with all the user cases and potential errors that a user would make then it is possible to design items will be very beneficial to people and that computers will become more a part of society than ever. I like the idea of user-centered design and I wish we were taught more about it than in my last semester of class.
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