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 story tells of Henry Ford’s buying scrapped Ford cars and having his engineers disassemble them to see which parts failed and which were still in good shape. Engineers assumed this was done to find...
A device is easy to use when the set of possible actions is visible, when the controls and displays exploit natural mappings.
A brain in a negative emotional state provides focus: precisely what is needed to maintain attention on a task and finish it.
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...
Effective memory uses all the clues available: knowledge in the world and in the head, combining world and mind. We have already seen how the combination allows us to function quite well in the world...
Yet surprisingly in this era of screen-based devices, paper tools are still enormously popular and effective, as the number of paper-based diaries and reminders indicates. The
When things work, we are informed, comfortable, and effective. When things break, we may no longer be able to function. This dependence upon technology is very old, but every decade, the impact covers...
The idea that a person is at fault when something goes wrong is deeply entrenched in society. That’s why we blame others and even ourselves. Unfortunately, the idea that a person is at fault is imbedd...
In the university, professors make up artificial problems. In the real world, the problems do not come in nice, neat packages. They have to be discovered.
In the absence of external information, people can let their imagination run free as long as the conceptual models they develop account for the facts as they perceive them. As
Beauty comes from conscious reflection and experience. It is influenced by knowledge, learning, and culture. Objects that are unattractive on the surface can give pleasure. Discordant music, for examp...
Affordances define what actions are possible. Signifiers specify how people discover those possibilities: signifiers are signs, perceptiblesignals of what can be done. Signifiers are of far more impor...
Unless it is your ambition to become a nightclub performer and amaze people with great skills of memory, here is a simpler way to dramatically enhance both memory and accuracy: write things down. Writ...
Once again, the designer should assume that people will be interrupted during their activities and that they may need assistance in resuming their operations.
It is possible to avoid failure, to always be safe. But that is also the route to a dull, uninteresting life.
If only people would read the instructions, they say, everything would be all right.