Why do people err? Because the designs focus upon the requirements of the system and the machines, and not upon the requirements of people.
Why do we need to know about the human mind? Because things are designed to be used by people, and without a deep understanding of people, the designs are apt to be faulty, difficult to use, difficult...
Business that makes and sells durable goods faces a problem: As soon as everyone who wants the product has it, then there is no need for more.
Key to winning the race is not to compete against machines but to compete with machines.
The real problem is that numerical correlations say nothing of people’s real needs, of their desires, and of the reasons for their activities. As a result, these numerical data can give a false impres...
A brain in a negative emotional state provides focus: precisely what is needed to maintain attention on a task and finish it.
A conceptual model is an explanation, usually highly simplified, of how something works. It doesn’t have to be complete or even accurate as long as it is useful. The
A device is easy to use when the set of possible actions is visible, when the controls and displays exploit natural mappings.
A major cause of error is time stress. Time is often critical, especially in such places as manufacturing or chemical processing plants and hospitals. But even everyday tasks can have time pressures....
Affordances, signifiers, mappings, and constraints can simplify our encounters with everyday objects. Failure to properly deploy these cues leads to problems.
An interesting property of slips is that, paradoxically, they tend to occur more frequently to skilled people than to novices. Why? Because slips often result from a lack of attention to the task. Ski...
Ask Why? as many times as may be necessary to get to the root cause of the problem and then fix it so it can never occur again.
Beauty comes from the reflective level. Beauty looks below the surface. Beauty comes from conscious reflection and experience. It is influenced by knowledge, learning, and culture. Objects that are un...
Best mapping: Controls are mounted directly on the item to be controlled. • Second-best mapping: Controls are as close as possible to the object to be controlled. • Third-best mapping:...
Blaming a person is seldom appropriate or useful, a
But in the world of sales, if a company were to make the perfect product, any other company would have to change it—which would make it worse—in order to promote its own innovation, to show that it wa...
Cognition and emotion are tightly intertwined, which means that the designers must design with both in mind.
Design is concerned with how things work, how they are controlled, and the nature of the interaction between people and technology.
Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.
How do pilots remember? They transform the new knowledge they have just received into memory in the world, sometimes by writing, sometimes by using the airplane’s equipment. The design implication? Th...
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