Market-driven pressures plus an engineering-driven company yield ever-increasing features, complexity, and confusion. But even companies that do intend to search for human needs are thwarted by the se...
Original ideas are the easy part. Actually producing the idea as a successful product is what is hard.
The proper natural mapping requires no diagrams, no labels, and no instructions.
A conceptual model is an explanation, usually highly simplified, of how something works. It doesn’t have to be complete or even accurate as long as it is useful.
A positive emotional state is ideal for creative thought, but it is not very well suited for getting things done. Too much, and we call the person scatterbrained, flitting from one topic to another, u...
A story tells of Henry Ford’s buying scrapped Ford cars and having his engineers disassemble them to see which parts failed and which were still in good shape. Engineers assumed this was done to find...
A usable design starts with careful observations of how the tasks being supported are actually performed, followed by a design process that results in a good fit to the actual ways the tasks get perfo...
AFTER DINNER, WITH A GREAT FLOURISH, my friend Andrew brought out a lovely leather box. Open it, he said, proudly, and tell me what you think. I opened the box. Inside was a gleaming stainless-steel s...
Basically, it means that when searching for the reason, even after you have found one, do not stop: ask why that was the case. And then ask why again. Keep asking until you have uncovered the true und...
Because retrieval is a reconstructive process, it can be erroneous. We may reconstruct events the way we would prefer to remember them, rather than the way we experienced them. It is relatively easy t...
Cognition attempts to make sense of the world: emotion assigns value.
Conventions are actually a form of cultural constraint, usually associated with how people behave. Some conventions determine what activities should be done; others prohibit or discourage actions. But...
Design is successful only if the final product is successful—if people buy it, use it, and enjoy it, thus spreading the word. A design that people do not purchase is a failed design, no matter how gre...
Engineers and businesspeople are trained to solve problems. Designers are trained to discover the real problems. A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve t...
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.
Finally, people have to actually purchase it. It doesn’t matter how good a product is if, in the end, nobody uses it.
Fire, yells someone in a theater. Immediately everyone stampedes toward the exits. What do they do at the exit door? Push. If the door doesn’t open, they push harder. But what if the door opens inward...
First, most accidents do not have a single cause: there are usually multiple things that went wrong, multiple events that, had any one of them not occurred, would have prevented the accident.
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...
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...
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