Design of Everyday Things [116]
2 This example is taken from White & Horwitz’s (1987) technical report on “ThinkerTools,” their system for teaching children physics, in part to overcome the beliefs in naive physics which are otherwise so strong.
3 The subject of naive views is treated at length in many reviews. The relationship between Aristotle’s physics and modern naive physics is developed in McCloskey’s (1983) Scientific American article, “Intuitive physics.”
4 The valve theory of the thermostat is taken from Kempton (1986), a study published in the journal Cognitive Science.
5 Some thermostats are designed to anticipate the need to turn on or off. They avoid a common problem: the temperature in a cooling house continues to drop after the thermostat has turned on the furnace, and the temperature of a heating house continues to rise after the thermostat has turned off the furnace, due to the heat already in the system. The “intelligent” thermostat turns off or on a little before the desired temperature is reached.
6 National Transportation Safety Board (1984), Aircraft accident report—Eastern Air Lines, Inc., Lockheed L-1011, N334EA, Miami International Airport, Miami, Florida, May 5, 1983.
7 Surprisingly little is known about the nature of action sequences. The most relevant book to what I am describing is Plans and the structure of behavior, by Miller, Galanter, and Pribram (1960). The GOMS (Goals, Operators, Methods, and Selection) model of Card, Moran, and Newell (1983) is more recent and more relevant to applications. My work is described in more detail in Norman (1986). Sanders (1980) has reviewed a host of experimental studies that supports this breakdown of the sequence into seven stages. A fair amount of work on a theory of action is being done by social psychologists. On the whole, this is a rich, unexplored area, worthy of much study.
8 The story of these gulfs and the initial analyses came about from research performed with Ed Hutchins and Jim Hollan, then part of a joint research team between the Naval Personnel Research and Development Center and the University of California, San Diego. The work examined the development of computer systems that were easier to learn and easier to use and, in particular, of what has been called direct manipulation computer systems. I return to this in chapter 6. The initial work is described in the chapter “Direct manipulation interfaces” in the book User centered system design (Hutchins, Hollan, & Norman, 1986).
CHAPTER THREE: Knowledge in the Head and in the World
1 Many people are responsible for the development of these demonstrations. I do not know who first pointed out the problems with remembering the letter-number matchup on the telephone. Nickerson & Adams (1979) and Rubin & Kontis (1983) showed that people could neither recall nor recognize accurately the pictures and words on American coins. Jonathan Grudin did the demonstration of the typists’ apparent lack of knowledge of the keyboard (unpublished study).
2 Thomas Malone, now at the MIT School of Business Administration, examined how people organize their work on their office desks. His studies of the importance of physical organization are often cited as justification for the frequent use of the desktop metaphor in some computer systems, especially the Xerox Star and the Apple Lisa and Macintosh (the Apple machines were derived from the Xerox Star; Malone was working for Xerox at the time he did his studies). See Malone’s (1983) paper “How do people organize their desks: Implications for designing office automation systems.”
3 I take this result from the work of Rubin & Kontis (1983), who attempted to determine the mental representation (the memory schema) that their students had for American coins.
4 Stanley Meisler, Times staff writer, in the