With the passage of time, the psychology of people stays the same, but the tools and objects in the world change.
When a new way of doing things is vastly superior to another, then the merits of change outweigh the difficulty of change. Just because something is different does not mean it is bad. If we only kept...
To understand products, it is not enough to understand design or technology: it is critical to understand business.
There are two different aspects to a reminder: the signal and the message. Just as in doing an action we can distinguish between knowing what can be done and knowing how to do it, in reminding we must...
The major areas of design relevant to this book are industrial design, interaction design, and experience design. None of the fields is well defined, but the focus of the efforts does vary, with indus...
Semantics is the study of meaning. Semantic constraints are those that rely upon the meaning of the situation to control the set of possible actions.
Principles of design:1. Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head.2. Simplify the structure of tasks.3. Make things visible: bridge gulfs between Execution and Evaluation.4. Get the ma...
Our strengths are in our flexibility and creativity, in coming up with solutions to novel problems. We are creative and imaginative, not mechanical and precise. Machines require precision and accuracy...
One way of overcoming the fear of the new is to make it look like the old.
One negative force is the demands of time: new models are already into their design process before the old ones have even been released to customers. Moreover, mechanisms for collecting and feeding ba...
Knowledge in the world includes perceived affordances and signifiers, the mappings between the parts that appear to be controls or places to manipulate and the resulting actions, and the physical cons...
It is only at the reflective level that consciousness and the highest levels of feeling, emotions, and cognition reside. It is only here that the full impact of both thought and emotions are experienc...
In the absence of external information, people can let their imagination run free as long as the conceptual models they develop account for the facts as they perceive them.
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 really badly designed.
How does the product manager keep the entire team on schedule despite the apparent random and divergent methods of designers? Encourage their free exploration, but hold them to the schedule (and budge...
Getting the specification of the thing to be defined is one of the most difficult parts of the design, so much so that the HCD principle is to avoid specifying the problem as long as possible but inst...
Even if the first versions of a product are well done, human-centered, and focused upon real needs, it is the rare organization that is content to let a good product stay untouched.
Each culture has a set of allowable actions for social situations. Thus, in our own culture we know how to behave in a restaurant— even one we have never been to before. This is how we manage to cope...
Constraints are powerful clues, limiting the set of possible actions. The thoughtful use of constraints in design lets people readily determine the proper course of action, even in a novel situation.
Cognition attempts to make sense of the world: emotion assigns value.