The Design of Everyday Things (53 page)

Moggridge, B. (2007).
Designing interactions
. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
http://www.designinginteractions.com
. Chapter 10 describes the methods of interaction design:
http://www.designinginteractions.com/chapters/10

Two handbooks provide comprehensive, detailed treatments of the topics in this book:

Jacko, J. A. (2012).
The human-computer interaction handbook: Fundamentals, evolving technologies, and emerging applications
(3rd edition). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

Lee, J. D., & Kirlik, A. (2013).
The Oxford handbook of cognitive engineering
. New York: Oxford University Press.

Which book should you look at? Both are excellent, and although expensive, well worth the price for anyone who intends to work in these fields. The
Human-Computer Interaction Handbook
, as the title suggests, focuses primarily on computer-enhanced interactions with technology, whereas the
Handbook of Cognitive Engineering
has a much broader coverage. Which book is better? That depends upon what problem you are working on. For my work, both are essential.

Finally, let me recommend two websites:

Interaction Design Foundation: Take special note of its Encyclopedia articles.
www.interaction-design.org

SIGCHI: The Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group for ACM.
www.sigchi.org

CHAPTER ONE: THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY THINGS

2
        
Coffeepot for Masochists:
This was created by the French artist Jacques Carelman (1984). The photograph shows a coffeepot inspired by Carelman, but owned by me. Photograph by Aymin Shamma for the author.

10
      
Affordances:
The perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson invented the word
affordance
to explain how people navigated the world (Gibson, 1979). I introduced the term into the world of interaction design in the first edition of this book (Norman, 1988). Since then, the number of writings on affordance has been enormous. Confusion over the appropriate way to use the term prompted me to introduce the concept of “signifier” in my book
Living with Complexity
(Norman, 2010), discussed throughout this book, but especially in
Chapters 1
and
4
.

CHAPTER TWO: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY ACTIONS

38
      
Gulfs of execution and evaluation:
The story of the gulfs and bridges of execution and evaluation came from research performed with Ed Hutchins and Jim Hollan, then part of a joint research team between the Naval Personnel Research and Development Center and the University of California, San Diego (Hollan and Hutchins are now professors of
cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego). The work examined the development of computer systems that were easier to learn and easier to use, and in particular, of what has been called direct manipulation computer systems. The initial work is described in the chapter “Direct Manipulation Interfaces” in the book from our laboratories,
User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction
(Hutchins, Hollan, & Norman, 1986). Also see the paper by Hollan, Hutchins, and David Kirsh, “Distributed Cognition: A New Foundation for Human-Computer Interaction Research” (Hollan, Hutchins, & Kirsh, 2000).

43
      
Levitt:
“People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” See Christensen, Cook, & Hal, 2006. The fact that Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt is credited with the quote about the drill and the hole is a good example of Stigler's law: “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” Thus, Levitt himself attributed the statement about drills and holes to Leo McGinneva (Levitt, 1983). Stigler's law is, itself, an example of the law: Stigler, a professor of statistics, wrote that he learned the law from the sociologist Robert Merton. See more at Wikipedia, “Stigler's Law of Eponymy” (Wikipedia contributors, 2013c).

46
      
Doorknob:
The question “In the house you lived in three houses ago, as you entered the front door, was the doorknob on the left or right?” comes from my paper “Memory, Knowledge, and the Answering of Questions” (Norman, 1973).

53
      
Visceral, behavioral, and reflective:
Daniel Kahneman's book,
Thinking Fast and Slow
(Kahneman, 2011), gives an excellent introduction to modern conceptions of the role of conscious and subconscious processing. The distinctions between visceral, behavioral, and reflective processing form the basis of my book
Emotional Design
(Norman, 2002, 2004). This model of the human cognitive and emotional system is described in more technical detail in the scientific paper I wrote with Andrew Ortony and William Revelle: “The Role of Affect and Proto-affect in Effective Functioning” (Ortony, Norman, & Revelle, 2005). Also see “Designers and Users: Two Perspectives on Emotion and Design” (Norman & Ortony, 2006).
Emotional Design
contains numerous examples of the role of design at all three levels.

58
      
Thermostat:
The valve theory of the thermostat is taken from Kempton, a study published in the journal
Cognitive Science
(1986). Intelligent thermostats try to predict when they will be required, turning on or off earlier than the simple control illustrated in
Chapter 2
can specify, to ensure that the desired temperature is reached at the desired time, without over- or undershooting the target.

63
      
Positive psychology:
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work on flow can be found in his several books on the topic (1990, 1997). Martin (Marty) Seligman developed the concept of learned helplessness, and then applied it to depression (Seligman, 1992). However, he decided that it was wrong for
psychology to continually focus upon difficulties and abnormalities, so he teamed up with Csikszentmihalyi to create a movement for positive psychology. An excellent introduction is provided in the article by the two of them in the journal
American Psychologist
(Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Since then, positive psychology has expanded to include books, journals, and conferences.

66
      
Human error:
People blame themselves: Unfortunately, blaming the user is imbedded in the legal system. When major accidents occur, official courts of inquiry are set up to assess the blame. More and more often, the blame is attributed to “human error.” But in my experience, human error usually is a result of poor design: why was the system ever designed so that a single act by a single person could cause calamity? An important book on this topic is Charles Perrow's
Normal Accidents
(1999).
Chapter 5
of this book provides a detailed examination of human error.

72
      
Feedforward:
Feedforward is an old concept from control theory, but I first encountered it applied to the seven stages of action in the paper by Jo Vermeulen, Kris Luyten, Elise van den Hoven, and Karin Coninx (2013).

CHAPTER THREE: KNOWLEDGE IN THE HEAD AND IN THE WORLD

74
      
American coins:
Ray Nickerson and Marilyn Adams, as well as David Rubin and Theda Kontis, showed that people could neither recall nor recognize accurately the pictures and words on American coins (Nickerson & Adams, 1979; Rubin & Kontis, 1983).

80
      
French coins:
The quotation about the French government release of the 10-franc coin comes from an article by Stanley Meisler (1986), reprinted with permission of the
Los Angeles Times
.

80
      
Descriptions in memory:
The suggestion that memory storage and retrieval is mediated through partial descriptions was put forth in a paper with Danny Bobrow (Norman & Bobrow, 1979). We argued that, in general, the required specificity of a description depends on the set of items among which a person is trying to distinguish. Memory retrieval can therefore involve a prolonged series of attempts during which the initial retrieval descriptions yield incomplete or erroneous results, so that the person must keep trying, each retrieval attempt coming closer to the answer and helping to make the description more precise.

83
      
Constraints of rhyming:
Given just the cues for meaning (the first task), the people David C. Rubin and Wanda T. Wallace tested could guess the three target words used in these examples only 0 percent, 4 percent, and 0 percent of the time, respectively. Similarly, when the same target words were cued only by rhymes, they still did quite poorly, guessing the targets correctly only 0 percent, 0 percent, and 4 percent of the time, respectively. Thus, each cue alone offered little assistance. Combining the meaning cue with the rhyming cue led to perfect performance: the people got the target words 100 percent of the time (Rubin & Wallace, 1989).

86
      
‘Ali Baba:
Alfred Bates Lord's work is summarized in his book
The Singer of Tales
(1960). The quotation from “‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” comes from
The Arabian Nights: Tales of Wonder and Magnificence
, selected and edited by Padraic Colum, translated by Edward William Lane (Colum & Ward, 1953). The names here are in an unfamiliar form: most of us know the magic phrase as “Open Sesame,” but according to Colum, “Simsim” is the authentic transliteration.

87
      
Passwords:
How do people cope with passwords? There are lots of studies: (Anderson, 2008; Florêncio, Herley, & Coskun, 2007; National Research Council Steering Committee on the Usability, Security, and Privacy of Computer Systems, 2010; Norman, 2009; Schneier, 2000).

                
To find the most common passwords, just search using some phrase such as “most common passwords.” My article on security, which led to numerous newspaper column references to it, is available on my website and was also published in the magazine for human-computer interaction,
Interactions
(Norman, 2009).

89
      
Hiding places:
The quotation about professional thieves' knowledge of how people hide things comes from Winograd and Soloway's study “On Forgetting the Locations of Things Stored in Special Places” (1986).

93
      
Mnemonics:
Mnemonic methods were covered in my book
Memory and Attention
, and although that book is old, the mnemonic techniques are even older, and are still unchanged (Norman, 1969, 1976). I discuss the effort of retrieval in
Learning and Memory
(Norman, 1982). Mnemonic techniques are easy to find: just search the web for “mnemonics.” Similarly, the properties of short- and long-term memory are readily found by an Internet search or in any text on experimental psychology, cognitive psychology, or neuropsychology (as opposed to clinical psychology) or a text on cognitive science. Alternatively, search online for “human memory,” “working memory,” “short-term memory” or “long-term memory.” Also see the book by Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter,
The Seven Sins of Memory
(2001). What are Schacter's seven sins? Transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, persistence, and bias.

101
    
Whitehead:
Alfred North Whitehead's quotation about the power of automated behavior is from
Chapter 5
of his book
An Introduction to Mathematics
(1911).

107
    
Prospective memory:
Considerable research on prospective memory and memory for the future is summarized in the articles by Dismukes on prospective memory and the review by Cristina Atance and Daniela O'Neill on memory for the future, or what they call “episodic future thinking” (Atance & O'Neill, 2001; Dismukes, 2012).

112
    
Transactive memory:
The term
transactive memory
was coined by Harvard professor of psychology Daniel Wegner (Lewis & Herndon, 2011; Wegner, D. M., 1987; Wegner, T. G., & Wegner, D. M., 1995).

113
    
Stove controls:
The difficulty in mapping stove controls to burners has been understood by human factors experts for over fifty years: Why are
stoves still designed so badly? This issue was addressed in 1959, the very first year of the
Human Factors Journal
(Chapanis & Lindenbaum, 1959).

118
    
Culture and design:
My discussion of the impact of culture on mappings was heavily informed by my discussions with Lera Boroditsky, then at Stanford University, but now in the cognitive science department at the University of California, San Diego. See her book chapter “How Languages Construct Time” (2011). Studies of the Australian Aborigine were reported by Núñez & Sweetser (2006).

CHAPTER FOUR: KNOWING WHAT TO DO: CONSTRAINTS, DISCOVERABILITY, AND FEEDBACK

126
    
InstaLoad:
A description of Microsoft's InstaLoad technology for battery contacts is available on its website:
www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/support/licensing-instaload-overview
.