Great designers produce pleasurable experiences. Experience: note the word. Engineers tend not to like it; it is too subjective. But when I ask them about their favorite automobile or test equipment,...
We must design our machines on the assumption that people will make errors.
Interlocks as forcing functions to prevent people from opening the door of the oven or disassembling the devices without first turning off the electric power: the interlock disconnects the power the i...
With open-source software, inexpensive open-source 3-D printers, and even open-source education, we can transform the world.
Whenever you see hand-lettered signs pasted on doors, switches, or products, trying to explain how to work them, what to do and what not to do, you are also looking at poor design.
To the designer, reflection is perhaps the most important of the levels of processing. Reflection is conscious, and the emotions produced at this level are the most protracted: those that assign agenc...
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 unaided mind is surprisingly limited. It is things that make us smart. Take advantage of them.
The study of slips is the study of the psychology of everyday errors—what Freud called the psychopathology of everyday life. Freud believed that slips have hidden, dark meanings, but most are accounte...
The hardest part of design is getting the requirements right, which means ensuring that the right problem is being solved, as well as that the solution is appropriate. Requirements made in the abstrac...
The debate is not useful. All groups are necessary. Customer research is a tradeoff: deep insights on real needs from a tiny set of people, versus broad, reliable purchasing data from a wide range and...
So we must design our machines on the assumption that people will make errors.
Skeuomorphic is the technical term for incorporating old, familiar ideas into new technologies,
Root cause analysis is the name of the game: investigate the accident until the single, underlying cause is found. What this ought to mean is that when people have indeed made erroneous decisions or a...
One way of overcoming the fear of the new is to make it look like the old. This practice is decried by design purists, but in fact, it has its benefits in easing the transition from the old to the new...
Most of human behavior is a result of subconscious processes. 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...
Lego Motorcycle. The toy Lego motorcycle is shown assembled (A) and in pieces (B). It has fifteen pieces so cleverly constructed that even an adult can put them together. The design exploits constrain...
Knowledge in the head includes conceptual models; cultural, semantic, and logical constraints on behavior; and analogies between the current situation and previous experiences with other situations.
It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.
Forcing functions are a form of physical constraint: situations in which the actions are constrained so that failure at one stage prevents the next step from happening. Starting a car has a forcing fu...
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