Could we ever switch to this or any of the many other rational systems? Unlikely: tradition is difficult to overcome.
At least my computer allows flexibility in type size; most do not.
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.
adults forget how difficult that task was.
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...
How
Great designers produce pleasurable experiences.
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...
Machines that give too much feedback are like backseat drivers.
Violate conventions and you are marked as an outsider. A rude outsider, at that.
Procedural knowledge is largely subconscious, residing at the behavioral level of processing.
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...
Make something too secure, and it becomes less secure.
It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people.
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.
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...
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.
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...