Blaming a person is seldom appropriate or useful, a
Beauty comes from the reflective level. Beauty looks below the surface. Beauty comes from conscious reflection and experience. It is influenced by knowledge, learning, and culture. Objects that are un...
An interesting property of slips is that, paradoxically, they tend to occur more frequently to skilled people than to novices. Why? Because slips often result from a lack of attention to the task. Ski...
The real problem is that numerical correlations say nothing of people’s real needs, of their desires, and of the reasons for their activities. As a result, these numerical data can give a false impres...
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
Why do we need to know about the human mind? Because things are designed to be used by people, and without a deep understanding of people, the designs are apt to be faulty, difficult to use, difficult...
Why do people err? Because the designs focus upon the requirements of the system and the machines, and not upon the requirements of people.
When people err, change the system so that type of error will be reduced or eliminated. When complete elimination is not possible, redesign to reduce the impact.
When people are anxious they tend to narrow their thought processes, concentration upon aspects directly relevant to a problem. This is a useful strategy in escaping from danger, but not in thinking o...
When a bridge collapses, we analyze the incident to find the causes of the collapse and reformulate the design rules to ensure that form of accident will never happen again. When we discover that elec...
What appears good in principle can sometimes fail when introduced to the world. Sometimes, bad products succeed and good products fail. The world is complex.
We bridge the Gulf of Execution through the use of signifiers, constraints, mappings, and a conceptual model. We bridge the Gulf of Evaluation through the use of feedback and a conceptual model.
Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.
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 vicious cycle starts: if you fail at something, you think it is your fault. Therefore you think you can’t do that task. As a result, next time you have to do the task, you believe you can’t, so yo...
The mind is more difficult to comprehend than actions. Most of us start by believing we already understand both human behavior and the human mind. After all, we are all human: we have all lived with o...
The meanings of today may not be the meanings of the future.
The designs of our products and services must also follow this philosophy. So, to the designers who are reading this, let me give some advice: •Do not blame people when they fail to use your products...