Danger awaits those who deliberately violate the frames of a culture.
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...
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,...
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...
Forget the complaints against complexity; instead, complain about confusion.
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.
Complex system: good design requires consideration of the
What are the design implications? Don’t count on much being retained in STM. Computer systems often enhance people’s frustration when things go wrong by presenting critical information in a message th...
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
Warning messages are surprisingly ineffective against mistakes (even nice requests, such as the one shown in Chapter 4, Figure 4.6, page 143). Was this a mistake or a slip? Both. Issuing the close com...
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...
In some Australian Aborigine societies, time moves relative to the environment based on the direction in which the sun rises and sets. Give
In design, one of the most difficult activities is to get the specifications right:
If the system lets you make the error, it is badly designed.
Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad de...
Effective design needs to satisfy a large number of constraints and concerns, including shape and form, cost and efficiency, reliability and effectiveness, understandability and usability, the pleasur...
As we just discussed, reminders provide a good example of the relative tradeoffs between knowledge in the world versus in the head. Knowledge in the world is accessible. It is self-reminding. It is al...
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,...