Design of Everyday Things - Norman, Don [115]
When you visit museums of science and technology, ask questions if you have trouble understanding. Provide feedback about the exhibits and whether they work well or poorly. Encourage museums to move toward better usability and understandability.
And enjoy yourself. Walk around the world examining the details of design. Take pride in the little things that help; think kindly of the person who so thoughtfully put them in. Realize that even details matter, that the designer may have had to fight to include something helpful. Give mental prizes to those who practice good design: send flowers. Jeer those who don’t: send weeds.
NOTES
CHAPTER ONE: The Psychopathology of Everyday Things
1 Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal, © Dow Jones & Co., Inc., 1986. All rights reserved.
2 W. H. Mayall (1979), Principles in design, 84.
3 The notion of affordance and the insights it provides originated with J. J. Gibson, a psychologist interested in how people see the world. I believe that affordances result from the mental interpretation of things, based on our past knowledge and experience applied to our perception of the things about us. My view is somewhat in conflict with the views of many Gibsonian psychologists, but this internal debate within modern psychology is of little relevance here. (See Gibson, 1977, 1979.)
4 D. Fisher & R. Bragonier, Jr. (1981), What’s what: A visual glossary of the physical world. The list of the eleven parts of the sink came from this book. I thank James Grier Miller for telling me about the book and lending me his copy.
5 Biederman (1987) shows how he derives the number 30,000 on pages 127 and 128 of his paper, “Recognition-by-components: A theory of human image understanding,” Psychological Review, 94, 115-147.
6 I thank Mike King for this example (and others).
7 More complex systems have already been successfully built. One example is the speech message system that recorded phone calls for later retrieval, built by IBM for the 1984 Olympics. Here was a rather complex telephone system, designed to record messages being sent to athletes by friends and colleagues from all over the world. The users spoke a variety of languages, and some were quite unfamiliar with the American telephone system and with high technology in general. But by careful application of psychological principles and continual testing with the user population during the design stage, the system was usable, understandable, and functional. Good design is possible to achieve, but it has to be one of the goals from the beginning. (See the description of the phone system by Gould, Boies, Levy, Richards, & Schoonard, 1987.)
CHAPTER TWO: The Psychology of Everyday Actions
1 Unfortunately, blaming the user is imbedded in the legal system. When major accidents occur, official courts of inquiry are set up to assess the blame. More and more often the blame is attributed to “human error.” The person involved can be fined, punished, or fired. Maybe training procedures are revised. The law rests comfortably. But in my experience, human error usually is a result of poor design: it should be called system error. Humans err continually; it is an intrinsic part of our nature. System design should take this into account. Pinning the blame on the person may be a comfortable way to proceed, but why was the system ever designed so that a single act by a single person could cause calamity? An important book on this topic is Charles Perrow’s Normal accidents (1984). I cover human error in detail in chapter 5.
2 This example is taken from White & Horwitz’s (1987) technical report on “ThinkerTools,” their system for teaching children physics,