Held: Friday, 28 February 2014

Back to Outline 17 - Human Factors (2). On to Outline 19 - Where We've Been, Where We're Going.

Summary

We conclude our exploration of the ways in which the design of technology affects how we interact with technology.

Related Pages

Overview

• A Challenge: Summarize and Exemplify Norman.
• Reference.

Administrivia

The Big Questions on Norman

A challenge to the class: Identify the ten most important points in Norman and give an example (not from Norman) that illustrates each of those points.

(Yes, this is intentionally slightly more than the 5-7 things you can easily keep in short-term memory.)

Reference: Norman's Outline

(Transcribed at a too-early hour by SamR.)

Chapter One: The Psychopathology of Everyday Things * You Would Need an Engineering Degre to Figure This Out (1) * The Frustration of Everyday Life (2) * The Psychology of Everyday Things (8) + Affordances (9) + Twenty Thousdand Everyday THings (11) + Conceptual Models (12) * Principles of Design for Understanding and Usability (13) + Provide a Good Conceptual Model (13) + Make Things Visible (17) + The Principle of Mapping (23) + The Principle of Feedback (27) * Pity The Poor Designer (28) * The Paradox of Technology (29)

Chapter Two: The Psychology of Everyday Actions (34) * Falsely Blaming Yourself (34) * Misconceptions of Everyday Life (36) + Aristotle's Naive Physics (36) + People as Explanatory Creatures (38) * Blaming the Wrong Cause (39) + Learned Helplessness (42) + Taught Helplessness (42) * The Nature of Human Thought and Explanation (43) * How People Do Things: The Seven States of Action (45) * The Gulfs of Execution and Evaluation (49) + The Gulf of Execution (51) + The Gulf of Evaluation (51) * The Seven Stages of Action as Design Aids (52)

Chapter Three: Knowledge in the Head and in the World (54) * Precise Behavior from Imprecise Knowledge (56) + Information is in the World (56) + Great Precision is Not Required (58) + The Power of Constraints (60) * Memory is Knowledge in the Head (62) + The Conspiracy Against Memory (63) + The Structure of Memory (66) - Memory for Arbitrary Things (67) - Memory for Meaningful Relationships (68) - Memory Through Explanation (70) * Memory is Also Knowledge in the World (72) + Reminding (72) + Natural Mappings (75) * The Tradeoff between Knowledge in the World and in the Head (79)

Chapter Four: Knowing What to Do (81) * A Classification of Everyday Constraints (82) + Physical Constraints (84) + Semantic Constraints (85) + Cultural Constraints (85) + Logical Constraints (86) * Applying Affordances and Constraints to Everyday Objects (87) + The Problem with Doors (87) + The Problem with Switches (92) - Which Switch Controls Which Function? (93) - How Are The Switches Arranged? (95) * Visibility and Feedback (99) + Making Visible the Invisible (100) - Nothing Succeeds Like a Good Display (101) - What Can Be Done? (101) + Using Sound for Visibility (102)

Chapter Five: To Err is Human (105) * Slips (106) + Types of Slips (107) - Capture Errors (107) - Description Errors (107) - Data-Driven Errors (109) - Associative Activiation Errors (109) - Loss of Activation Errors (109) - Mode Errors (110) + Detecting Slips (110) + Design Lessons from the Study of Slips (112) * Mistakes as Errors of Thought (114) + Some Models of Human Thought (114) + The Connectionist Approach (116) * The Structure of Tasks (119) + Wide and Deep Structures (119) + Shallow Structures (121) + Narrow Structures (121) + The Nature of Everyday Tasks (124) * Conscious and Subconscious Behavior (125) + Explaining Away Errors (127) + Social Pressure and Mistakes (129) * Designing for Error (131) + How to Deal with Error - And How Not To (131) + Forcing Functions (132) * A Design Philosophy (140)

Chapter Six: The Design Challenge (141) * The Natural Evolution of Design (142) + Forces that Work Against Evolutionary Design (142) + The Typewriter: A Case History in the Evolution of Design (145) * Why Designers Go Astray (151) + Putting Aesthetics First (151) + Designers are Not Typical Users (155) + The Designer's Clients May Not Be Users (157) * The Complexity of the Design Process (158) + Designing for Special People (161) + Selective Attention: The Problem of Focus (164) * The Faucet: A Case History of Design Difficulties (166) * Two Deadly Temptations for Designers (172) + Creeping Featurism (172) + The Worshipping of False Images (174) * The Foibles of Computer Systems (177) + How to Do Things Wrong (178) + It's Not Too Late To Do Things Right (179) + Computer as Chameleon (183) - Explorable Systems: Inviting Experimentation (183) - Two Modes of Computer Usage (184) - The Invisible Computer of the Future (185)

Chapter Seven: User-Centered Design (187) * Seven Principles for Transforming Difficult Tasks into Simple Ones (188) + Use Knowledge in the World and Knowledge in the Head (189) - Three Conceptual Models (189) - The Role of Manuals (190) + Simplify the Structure of Tasks (191) - Keep the Task Much the Same, But Provide Mental Aids (192) - Use Technology to Make Visible What Would Otherwise Be Invisible, Thus Improving Feedback and the Ability to Keep Control (192) - Automate, But Keep the Task Much the Same (193) - Change the Nature of the Task (194) - Don't Take Away Control (197) + Make Things Visible: Bridge the Gulfs of Execution and Evaluation (197) + Get the Mappings Right (199) + Exploit the Power of Constraints: Both Natural and Artificial (199) + Design for Error (200) + When All Else Fails, Standardize (200) - Standardization and Technology (201) - The Timing of Standardization (202) * Deliberately Making Things Difficult (203) + Designing a Dugeons and Dragons Game (206) + Easy Looking is Not Necessarily Easy to Use (208) * Design and Society (209) + How Writing Method Affects Styles (210) - From Quill and Ink to Keyboard and Microphone (210) - Outline Processors and Hypertext (211) + The Home fo the Future: A Place of Comfort or a New Source of Frustration (213) * The Design of Everyday Things (216)