The Design of Everyday Things

by Donald A. Norman

A major cause of error is time stress. Time is often critical, especially in such places as manufacturing or chemical processing plants and hospitals. But even everyday tasks can have time pressures. Add environmental factors, such as poor weather or heavy traffic, and the time stresses increase. In commercial establishments, there is strong pressure not to slow the processes, because doing so would inconvenience many, lead to significant loss of money, and, in a hospital, possibly decrease the quality of patient care. There is a lot of pressure to push ahead with the work even when an outside observer would say it was dangerous to do so. In many industries, if the operators actually obeyed all the procedures, the work would never get done. So we push the boundaries: we stay up far longer than is natural. We try to do too many tasks at the same time. We drive faster than is safe. Most of the time we manage okay. We might even be rewarded and praised for our heroic efforts. But when things go wrong and we fail, then this same behavior is blamed and punished.