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...
Day a product development process starts, it is behind schedule and above budget.
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...
In design, one of the most difficult activities is to get the specifications right:
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...
Fail often, fail fast,
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...
adults forget how difficult that task was.
The standards should reflect the psychological conceptual models, not the physical mechanics.
The best products come from ignoring these competing voices and instead focusing on the true needs of the people who use the product.
Machines that give too much feedback are like backseat drivers.
In some Australian Aborigine societies, time moves relative to the environment based on the direction in which the sun rises and sets. Give
Forget the complaints against complexity; instead, complain about confusion.
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...
What happens when we rely too much upon external knowledge, be it knowledge in the world, knowledge of friends, or knowledge provided by our technology? On the one hand, there no such thing as too muc...
There seems to be a conspiracy, one calculated to destroy our sanity by overloading our memory. Many codes, such as postal codes and telephone numbers, exist primarily to make life easier for machines...
The solution is human-centered design (HCD), an approach that puts human needs, capabilities, and behavior first, then designs to accommodate those needs, capabilities, and ways of behaving.
So we must design our machines on the assumption that people will make errors.