Engineers and designers simultaneously know too much and too little. They know too much about the technology and too little about how other people live their live and do their activities.
With all the alarms that trigger when a problem arises, even though it might be minor, and all the everyday failures, how does one know which might be a significant indicator of a major problem? Every...
At least my computer allows flexibility in type size; most do not.
The impact of competitive forces that drive the introduction of extra features, often to excess: the cause of the disease dubbed featuritis, whose major symptom is creeping featurism.
We are unaware of them. As a result, many of our beliefs about how people behave—including beliefs about ourselves—are wrong. That is why we have the multiple social and behavioral sciences, with a go...
Violate conventions and you are marked as an outsider. A rude outsider, at that.
Many of us spend hours filling out forms on computers—forms that require names, dates, addresses, telephone numbers, monetary sums, and other information in a fixed, rigid format. Worse, often we are...
It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people.
Will robot teachers replace human teachers? No, but they can complement them. Moreover, the could be sufficient in situations where there is no alternative––to enable learning while traveling, or whil...
The next time you can’t immediately figure out the shower control in a hotel room or have trouble using an unfamiliar television set or kitchen appliance, remember that the problem is in the design. A...
Procedural knowledge is largely subconscious, residing at the behavioral level of processing.
Because we are all designers in the sense that all of us deliberately design our lives, our rooms, and the way we do things.
As a rule, it takes time for information to get into LTM and time and effort to get it out again.
Alas, sometimes clever people are too clever for our good. Some well-meaning plumbing designers have decided that consistency should be ignored in favor of their own, private brand of psychology.
When many people all have the same problem, shouldn’t another cause be found? If the system lets you make the error, it is badly designed. And if the system induces you to make the error, then it is r...
We need to remove the word failure from our vocabulary, replacing it instead with learning experience. To fail is to learn: we learn more from our failures than from our successes. With success, sure,...
Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, calls his approach customer obsessed. Everything is focused upon the requirements of Amazon’s customers. The competition is ignored, the traditional mark...
Good design starts with an understanding of psychology and technology. Good design requires good communication, especially from machine to person, indicating what actions are possible, what is happeni...
Bath and kitchen faucet design ought to be simple, but can violate many design principles, including: • Visible affordances and signifiers • Discoverability • Immediacy of feed...
The first edition of this book, then called POET, The Psychology of Everyday Things, I started with these lines: This is the book I always wanted to write, except I didn’t know it. Today I do know it,...