When things go right, people credit their own abilities and intelligence. The onlookers do the reverse. When they see things go well for someone else, they sometimes credit the environment, or luck.
When companies try to increase sales by matching every feature of their competitors, they end up hurting themselves. After all, when products from two companies match feature by feature, there is no l...
When a bridge collapses, we analyze the incident to find the causes of the collapse and reformulate the design rules to ensure that form of accident will never happen again. When we discover that elec...
What is natural depends upon point of view, the choice of metaphor, and therefore, the culture. The design difficulties occur when there is a switch in metaphors. Airplane
We only need to remember sufficient knowledge to let us get our tasks done. Because so much knowledge is available in the environment, it is surprising how little we need to learn. This is one reason...
Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding. Discoverability: Is it possible to even figure out what actions are possible and where and how to perfor...
The visible affordances of the pieces were important in determining just how they fit together. The cylinders and holes characteristic of Lego suggested the major construction rule. The sizes and shap...
The sheer number of different reminder methods also indicates that there is indeed a great need for assistance in remembering, but that none of the many schemes and devices is completely satisfactory....
The presence of an affordance is jointly determined by the qualities of the object and the abilities of the agent that is interacting. This relational definition of affordance gives considerable diffi...
Subconscious thought is biased toward regularity and structure, and it is limited in formal power. It may not be capable of symbolic manipulation, of careful reasoning through a sequence of steps. Con...
Recognize that most of our interactions with products are actually interactions with a complex system: good design requires consideration of the entire system to ensure that the requirements, intentio...
Even systems that do not use menus need to provide some structure: appropriate constraints and forcing functions, natural good mapping, and all the tools of feedforward and feedback. The most effectiv...
Designers should strive to minimize the chance of inappropriate actions in the first place by using affordances, signifiers, good mapping, and constraints to guide the actions. If a person performs an...
Consistency in design is virtuous. It means that lessons learned with one system transfer readily to others. On the whole, consistency is to be followed. If a new way of doing things is only slightly...
Cognition and emotion cannot be separated. Cognitive thoughts lead to emotions: emotions drive cognitive thoughts. The brain is structured to act upon the world, and every action carries with it expec...
Cognition and emotion are tightly intertwined, which means that the designers must design with both in mind.
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...
A brain in a negative emotional state provides focus: precisely what is needed to maintain attention on a task and finish it.
Thus, novices are more likely to make mistakes than slips, whereas experts are more likely to make slips. Mistakes often arise from ambiguous or unclear information about the current state of a system...
Semantics is the study of meaning. Semantic constraints are those that rely upon the meaning of the situation to control the set of possible actions. In the case of the motorcycle, there is only one m...