“The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman

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  • Blame bad design, not human behavior
  • Visibility is a good reminder of what can be done
  • 1:1 button-to-function ratio is the simplest design
  • There are “additives” and “substitutive” dimensions
  • Feedback is important to determine relationship
  • At the store, users care about prestige; at home, they care more about useability
  • Arbitrary design happens when the design is broken
  • Design so errors have a low cost
  • We blame the environment when we fail and praise ourselves when we succeed; we blame others when they fail and praise their environment when they succeed
  • We typically only store partial descriptions in memory (this saves time and space) enough to discriminate from similar items
  • Rote memory is difficult to maintain
  • Interpreting the arbitrary is not the same as understanding it
  • Reminders have signals and actions
  • If a design relays on labels, the design is faulty
  • Usability should be considered in the purchase
  • Seven steps of execution
    • Plan
    • Specify
    • Perform
    • Perceive
    • Interpret
    • Compare
  • Mistakes are made in the reflective stages (plan and compare)
  • Slips are made in the other stages
  • Focusing on aesthetics can be detrimental to functionality
  • Use groupings and shapes to make switches intuitive
  • Slips are doing something when intending to do another
    • Capture errors (starting a task with a common start but switching to another)
    • Description error (correct action on the wrong object)
    • Data driven errors (dialing the number you are staring at instead of from memory)
    • Association errors
    • Mode errors
  • We classify the rare as either unique or common and both are wrong
  • Warning signals are rarely the solution
  • Iterative processes allowed to naturally improve the product over time
  • If you cannot constrain, standardize

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