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...
It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people.
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...
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...
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.
Violate conventions and you are marked as an outsider. A rude outsider, at that.
At least my computer allows flexibility in type size; most do not.
Procedural knowledge is largely subconscious, residing at the behavioral level of processing.
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,...
Could we ever switch to this or any of the many other rational systems? Unlikely: tradition is difficult to overcome.
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...
Because we are all designers in the sense that all of us deliberately design our lives, our rooms, and the way we do things.
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...
As a rule, it takes time for information to get into LTM and time and effort to get it out again.
We are creative and imaginative, not mechanical and precise. Machines require precision and accuracy; people don’t. And we are particularly bad at providing precise and accurate inputs. So
Seven fundamental principles of design: 1.Discoverability. It is possible to determine what actions are possible and the current state of the device. 2.Feedback. There is full and continuous informa...
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...
Bath and kitchen faucet design ought to be simple, but can violate many design principles, including: • Visible affordances and signifiers • Discoverability • Immediacy of feed...
Day a product development process starts, it is behind schedule and above budget.
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