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.
How does one discover unarticulated needs? Certainly not by asking, not by focus groups, not by surveys or questionnaires. Who would have thought to mention the need for cup holders in a car, or on a...
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...
Design is concerned with how things work, how they are controlled, and the nature of the interaction between people and technology. When done well, the results are brilliant, pleasurable products. Whe...
Danger awaits those who deliberately violate the frames of a culture.
Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where the action should take place. We
Any time you see signs or labels added to a device, it is an indication of bad design: a simple lock should not require instructions.
With open-source software, inexpensive open-source 3-D printers, and even open-source education, we can transform the world.
Why does inelegant design persist for so long? This is called the legacy problem, and it will come up several times in this book. Too many devices use the existing standard—that is the legacy. If the...
Why do people buy an expensive, complicated toaster when a simpler, less-expensive toaster would work just as well? Why all the buttons and controls on steering wheels and rearview mirrors? Because th...
The problem with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.
The most effective way of helping people remember is to make it unnecessary.
The design of everyday things is in great danger of becoming the design of superfluous, overloaded, unnecessary things.
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 push the boundaries: we stay up far longer than is natural. We try to do too many tasks at the same time. We drive faster than is safe. Most of the time we manage okay. We might even be rewarded...
So the hierarchy of goals is roughly: satisfy hunger; eat; cook; read cookbook; get more light. This is called a root cause analysis: asking Why? until the ultimate, fundamental cause of the activity...
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...
Perceived affordances help people figure out what actions are possible without the need for labels or instructions.
Once people find an explanation for an apparent anomaly, they tend to believe they can now discount it. But explanations are based on analogy with past experiences, experiences that may not apply to t...
Never underestimate the power of social pressures on behavior, causing otherwise sensible people to do things they know are wrong and possibly dangerous.