The Design of Everyday Things
Donald A. Norman
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0465067107
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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can do the simulation because the parts are visible and the implications clear. Other clues to how things work come from their visible structure—in particular from affordances, constraints, and mappings. Consider a pair of scissors: even if you have never seen or used them before, you can see that the number of possible actions is limited. The holes are clearly there to put something into, and the only logical things that will fit are fingers. The holes are affordances: they allow the the
library did it! Every time I connect it to the library catalog I have trouble. Now I can’t even use the terminal to read my computer mail anymore.” “That doesn’t make sense,” I replied. “You can’t even turn on the power to the terminal. How could a computer program possibly do that kind of damage?” “All I know,” he said, “is that everything was working fine until I tried to look up an author in the library catalog using that new library program, and then my terminal stopped working. I
their airport in the six months preceding the flight 007 incident, and the airline had told its pilots that the next pilot who returned would be punished. Was this a factor in the accident? It’s hard to know, but the design of the INS sounds badly deficient. The social pressures on the crew not to find (or admit to) an error in the INS were clearly strong. But punishment for following a safety procedure is never wise. The proper approach would be to redesign either the INS’s or the procedures for
and that the individual is in no position to discover all the relevant factors. There is no substitute for interaction with and study of actual users of a proposed design. “Steve Wozniak, the whiz-kid co-founder of Apple Computer offered the first public glimpse of CORE, his latest brainchild. “CORE, which stands for controller of remote electronics, is a single device that allows consumers to fully operate their home equipment by remote control as long as the equipment is all in one
represented by the distance a hand moves around a circle is a good one. The problem is that we use two or three different hands moving around the same circle, each one meaning something different and operating on a different scale. Which hand is which? (Do you remember how hard it is to teach a child the difference between the little hand and the big hand, and not to confuse the second hand-which is sometimes big, sometimes little-with the minute hand or the hour hand?) Do I exaggerate? Read