More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Great designers use their aesthetic sensibilities to drive these visceral responses.
Visceral responses matter.
For designers, the most critical aspect of the behavioral level is that every action is associated with an expectation.
Behavioral states are learned.
Feedback—knowledge of results—is how expectations are resolved and is critical to learning and the development of skilled behavior.
Emotion and cognition are tightly intertwined.
To the designer, reflection is perhaps the most important of the levels of processing. Reflection is conscious,
Reflective responses are part of our memory of events.
Memories last far longer than the immediate experience or the period of usage, which are the domains of the visceral and behavioral levels.
Reflective memories are often more important than reality. If we have a strongly positive visceral response but disappointing usability problems at the behavioral level, when we reflect back upon the product, the reflective level might very well weigh the positive response strongly enough to overlook the severe behavioral difficulties (hence the phrase, “Attractive things work better”).
discomfort
Understanding arises at a combination of the behavioral and reflective levels.
Well-designed devices can induce pride and enjoyment, a feeling of being in control and pleasure—possibly even love and attachment.
High-level reflective cognition can trigger lower-level emotions.
Lower-level emotions can trigger higher-level reflective cognition.
social scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has labeled “flow.”
The task, moreover, is at just the proper level of difficulty: difficult enough to provide a challenge and require continued attention, but not so difficult that it invokes frustration and anxiety.
People are innately disposed to look for causes of events, to form explanations and stories. That is one reason storytelling is such a persuasive medium.
Stories resonate with our experiences and provide examples of new instances.
From our experiences and the stories of others we tend to form generalizations about the way pe...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Conceptual models are a form of story,
everyone forms stories (conceptual models) to explain what they have observed.
It seems natural for people to blame their own misfortunes on the environment. It seems equally natural to blame other people’s misfortunes on their personalities. Just the opposite attribution, by the way, is made when things go well. When things go right, people credit their own abilities and intelligence. The onlookers do the reverse. When they see things go well for someone else, they sometimes credit the environment, or luck.
whether a person is inappropriately accepting blame for the inability to work simple objects or attributing behavior to environment or personality, a faulty conceptual model is at work.
learned helplessness
When something doesn’t work, it can be considered an interesting challenge, or perhaps just a positive learning experience.
Designers need to fail, as do researchers.
failures are an essential part of exploration and creativity.
Do not blame people when they fail to use your products properly. • Take people’s difficulties as signifiers of where the product can be improved. • Eliminate all error messages from electronic or computer systems. Instead, provide help and guidance. • Make it possible to correct problems directly from help and guidance messages. Allow people to continue with their task: Don’t impede progress—help make it smooth and continuous. Never make people start over. • Assume that what people have done is partially correct, so if it is inappropriate, provide the guidance
...more
The idea that a person is at fault when something goes wrong is deeply entrenched in society.
human error usually is a result of poor design: it should be called system error.
Eliminate the term human error. Instead, talk about communication and interaction: what we call an error is usually bad communication or interaction.
Machines are not people. They can’t communicate and understand the same way we do. This means that their designers have a special obligation to ensure that the behavior of machines is understandable to the people who interact with them.
People are not machines.
Our strengths are in our flexibility and creativity, in coming up with solutions to novel problems. We are creative and imaginative, not mechanical and precise.
When people interact with machines, things will not always go smoothly. This is to be expected. So designers should anticipate this.
The hard and necessary part of design is to make things work well even when things do not go as planned.
Is Nest perfect? No, but it marks improvement in the collaborative interaction of people and everyday things.
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 does it mean? 7. Is this okay? Have I accomplished my goal?
Anyone using a product should always be able to determine the answers to all seven questions. This puts the burden on the designer to ensure that at each stage, the product provides the information required to answer the question.
Feedforward is accomplished through appropriate use of signifiers, constraints, and mappings.
Feedback is accomplished through explicit information about the impact of the action.
The insights from the seven stages of action lead us to seven fundamental principles of design:
1. Discoverability. It is possible to determine what actions are possible and the current state of the device.
2. Feedback. There is full and continuous information about the results of actions and the current state of the product or service. After an action has been executed, it is easy to determine the new state.
3. Conceptual model. The design projects all the information needed to create a good conceptual model of the system, leading to understanding and a feeling of control. The conceptual model enhances both discoverability and evaluation of results.
4. Affordances. The proper affordances exist to make the desired actions possible.
5. Signifiers. Effective use of signifiers ensures discoverability and that the feedback is well communicated and intelligible.
6. Mappings. The relationship between controls and their actions follows the principles of good mapping, enhanced as much as possible through spatial layout and temporal contiguity.
