Norman’s Law: The day the product team is announced, it is behind schedule and over its budget.
More and more often the blame is attributed to human error. The person involved can be fined, punished, or fired. Maybe training procedures are revised. The law rests comfortably. But in my experience...
If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.
Hindsight is always superior to foresight. When the accident investigation committee reviews the event that contributed to the problem, they know what actually happened, so it is easy for them to pick...
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...
Finally, people have to actually purchase it. It doesn’t matter how good a product is if, in the end, nobody uses it.
Don’t these so-called advances also cause us to lose valuable mental skills? Each technological advance that provides a mental aid also brings along critics who decry the loss of the human skill that...
Design is concerned with how things work, how they are controlled, and the nature of the interaction between people and technology.
Cultural constraints are likely to change with time.
Creeping featurism is the tendency to add to the number of features of a product, often extending the number beyond all reason. There is no way that a product can remain usable and understandable by t...
Complexity can be tamed, but it requires considerable effort to do it well. Decreasing the number of buttons and displays is not the solution. The solution is to understand the total system, to design...
Cognition attempts to make sense of the world: emotion assigns value. It is the emotional system that determines whether a situation is safe or threatening, whether something that is happening is good...
1. What do I want to accomplish? 2. What are the alternative action sequences? 3. What action can I do now? 4. How do I do it? 5. What happened? 6. What...
Original ideas are the easy part. Actually producing the idea as a successful product is what is hard.
Key to winning the race is not to compete against machines but to compete with machines.
You are designing for people the way you would like them to be, not for the way they really are. When
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...
Three Levels of Processing: Visceral, Behavioral, and Reflective. Visceral and behavioral levels are subconscious and the home of basic emotions. The reflective level is where conscious thought and de...
The most effective way of helping people remember is to make it unnecessary.