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By Root 2525 0

just when it fails, and you are apt to believe that you caused the failure, even though the failure and your action were related only by coincidence. Such false causality is the basis for much superstition. Many of the peculiar behaviors of people using computer systems or complex household appliances result from such false coincidences. When an action has no apparent result, you may conclude that the action was ineffective. So you repeat it. In earlier days, when computer word processors did not always show the results of their operations, people would sometimes attempt to change their manuscript, but the lack of visible effect from each action would make them think that their commands had not been executed, so they would repeat the commands, sometimes over and over, to their later astonishment and regret. It is a poor design that allows either kind of false causality to occur.

TWENTY THOUSAND EVERYDAY THINGS

There are an amazing number of everyday things, perhaps twenty thousand of them. Are there really that many? Start by looking about you. There are light fixtures, bulbs, and sockets; wall plates and screws; clocks, watches, and watchbands. There are writing devices (I count twelve in front of me, each different in function, color, or style). There are clothes, with different functions, openings, and flaps. Notice the variety of materials and pieces. Notice the variety of fasteners—buttons, zippers, snaps, laces. Look at all the furniture and food utensils: all those details, each serving some function for manufacturability, usage, or appearance. Consider the work area: paper clips, scissors, pads of paper, magazines, books, bookmarks. In the room I’m working in, I counted more than a hundred specialized objects before I tired. Each is simple, but each requires its own method of operation, each has to be learned, each does its own specialized task, and each has to be designed separately. Furthermore, many of the objects are made of many parts. A desk stapler has sixteen parts, a household iron fifteen, the simple bathtub-shower combination twenty-three. You can’t believe these simple objects have so many parts? Here are the eleven basic parts to a sink: drain, flange (around the drain), pop-up stopper, basin, soap dish, overflow vent, spout, lift rod, fittings, hot-water handle, and cold-water handle. We can count even more if we start taking the faucets, fittings, and lift rods apart.

The book What’s What: A Visual Glossary of the Physical World has more than fifteen hundred drawings and pictures and illustrates twenty-three thousand items or parts of items.4 Irving Biederman, a psychologist who studies visual perception, estimates that there are probably “30,000 readily discriminable objects for the adult.”5 Whatever the exact number, it is clear that the difficulties of everyday life are amplified by the sheer profusion of items. Suppose that each everyday thing takes only one minute to learn; learning 20,000 of them occupies 20,000 minutes—333 hours or about 8 forty-hour work weeks. Furthermore, we often encounter new objects unexpectedly, when we are really concerned with something else. We are confused and distracted, and what ought to be a simple, effortless, everyday thing interferes with the important task of the moment.

How do people cope? Part of the answer lies in the way the mind works—in the psychology of human thought and cognition. Part lies in the information available from the appearance of the objects—the psychology of everyday things. And part comes from the ability of the designer to make the operation clear, to project a good image of the operation, and to take advantage of other things people might be expected to know. Here is where the designer’s knowledge of the psychology of people coupled with knowledge of how things work becomes crucial.

CONCEPTUAL MODELS

Consider the rather strange bicycle illustrated in figure 1.7. You know it won’t work because you form a conceptual model of the device and mentally simulate its operation. You can do the simulation because the parts