The Design of Everyday Things - Vocabulary

Flashcards covering vocabulary and key concepts from the lecture notes on 'The Design of Everyday Things' by Don Norman.

The Psychology of Everyday Things (POET)

The first edition of "The Design of Everyday Things" (1988), intended as a starter kit for good design.

Good design

Designs that fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself.

Bad design

Designs that scream out their inadequacies, making themselves very noticeable.

The Design of Everyday Things (DOET)

Updated title (1990, 2002, 2013 editions) for the original "The Psychology of Everyday Things," made less cute and more descriptive.

Human-centered design (HCD)

An approach that puts human needs, capabilities, and behavior first, then designs to accommodate those needs, capabilities, and ways of behaving.

User experience

A term for the total experience of a product, covering usability, aesthetics, pleasure, and fun.

User Experience Architect’s Office

The name of the group headed by Don Norman at Apple in the early 1990s.

Signifiers

Any perceptible indicator that communicates appropriate behavior to a person, whether deliberate or unintentional, signaling what actions are possible and how they should be done.

Affordances (design concept)

Define what actions are possible for physical objects.

Discoverability

The characteristic of a design that makes it possible to figure out what actions are possible and where and how to perform them.

Understanding (in design)

The characteristic of a design that makes it clear how the product is supposed to be used and what all the different controls and settings mean.

Coffeepot for Masochists

An item from Jacques Carelman’s series Catalogue d’objets introuvables (Catalog of unfindable objects), providing an example of a deliberately unworkable object.

Industrial design

The professional service of creating and developing concepts and specifications that optimize the function, value, and appearance of products and systems for the mutual benefit of both user and manufacturer.

Interaction design

Focuses on how people interact with technology, with the goal of enhancing people’s understanding of what can be done, what is happening, and what has just occurred.

Experience design

The practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality and enjoyment of the total experience.

Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident

An incident where a simple mechanical failure was misdiagnosed, leading to destruction of the reactor and a near severe radiation release, initially blamed on 'human error' but later attributed to poor control room design.

Cognition and emotion

Tightly intertwined processes, with cognition attempting to make sense of the world and emotion assigning value.

Affordance

The relationship between a physical object and a person that determines just how the object could possibly be used, existing even if not visible.

Anti-affordance

The prevention of interaction with an object.

J. J. Gibson

An eminent psychologist who originated the notion of affordance and provided many advances to the understanding of human perception, particularly through his 'ecological approach to perception'.

Gibsonian psychology

An ecological approach to perception that argues the world contains clues that people simply pick up through 'direct perception,' emphasizing the combined information picked up by all sensory apparatus.

Perceived affordances

Visible affordances that provide strong clues to the operations of things, helping people figure out what actions are possible without labels or instructions.

Semiotics

The study of signs and symbols, from which the term 'signifier' is borrowed.

Accidental signifier

A useful signal that was not deliberately placed, such as the physical placement of a bookmark indicating how much of a book remains.

Mapping

A technical term, borrowed from mathematics, meaning the relationship between the elements of two sets of things, used in design to describe the relationship between controls and the devices being controlled.

Natural mapping

Taking advantage of spatial analogies to make the relationship between a control and its results easy to learn, leading to immediate understanding.

Gestalt psychology

A field of psychology whose principles of grouping and proximity can be used to map controls to function, suggesting related controls should be grouped together and close to the item being controlled.

Feedback

Communicating the results of an action, which must be immediate and informative, essential for people to know that the system is working on their request.

Conceptual model

An explanation, usually highly simplified, of how something works, which doesn't have to be complete or accurate as long as it is useful, and provides true understanding.

Mental models

The conceptual models in people’s minds that represent their understanding of how things work.

System image

The combined information available to users (what a device looks like, knowledge from similar things, sales literature, manuals, etc.) that helps them form an appropriate conceptual model.

The paradox of technology

The same technology that simplifies life by providing more functions in each device also complicates life by making the device harder to learn and harder to use.

Flow

A state of complete immersion into an activity, where people lose track of time and the outside environment, and the task is at just the proper level of difficulty.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

A social scientist who labeled the state of complete immersion into an activity as 'flow'.

Gulf of Execution

The gap that users face when they try to figure out how to operate something.

Gulf of Evaluation

The gap that users face when they try to figure out what happened after performing an action and how well their expectations have been met.

Goal-driven behavior

Action where the cycle starts from the top by establishing a new goal, then goes through the stages of execution.

Data-driven behavior (Event-driven behavior)

Action where the cycle starts from the bottom, triggered by some event in the world, then goes through the stages of evaluation.

Root cause analysis

The process of asking 'Why?' until the ultimate, fundamental cause of an activity or problem is reached.

Theodore Levitt

Harvard Business School marketing professor famous for the quote, 'People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!'.

Panic bars

A design feature on exit doors, often with a large horizontal surface, that provides an unambiguous signifier and physical constraint, allowing people to open the door by pushing their bodies against them, especially useful during emergencies like fire.

Learned helplessness

A phenomenon in which people experience repeated failure at a task and, as a result, decide that the task cannot be done by them, leading them to stop trying.

Taught helplessness

A term for situations where initial failures, often with everyday objects or academic subjects, generalize by self-blame to all similar tasks, leading people to believe they are technically or mechanically inept.

Subconscious thought

A powerful information processing system that matches patterns, proceeds rapidly and automatically, and is good at detecting general trends and generalizing from few examples.

Conscious thought

A slow and laborious process where decisions are pondered, alternatives are thought through, and formal logic, mathematics, and decision theory are applied.

Visceral level (of processing)

The most basic level of processing, sometimes referred to as 'the lizard brain,' which makes quick, subconscious judgments about the environment (good or bad, safe or dangerous) and produces immediate affective states.

Behavioral level (of processing)

The level of processing that is home to learned skills, triggered by appropriate patterns, where actions and analyses are largely subconscious, and every action is associated with an expectation.

Reflective level (of processing)

The home of conscious cognition, where deep understanding develops, reasoning and conscious decision-making take place, and the highest levels of emotions (assigning agency, blame, pride) develop.

Feedforward

Information that helps answer questions about what actions can be done, accomplished through appropriate use of signifiers, constraints, and mappings.

Declarative knowledge

Knowledge of facts and rules, which is easy to write and teach.

Procedural knowledge

Knowledge that enables a person to be a skilled musician or perform other actions, difficult to write down or teach, and best learned through demonstration and practice.

Ray Nickerson and Marilyn Adams

Psychologists who showed that people do not remember what common coins look like, despite using them properly.

Stigler’s law

The observation that 'No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer,' explaining why names of famous people often get attached to ideas they had nothing to do with.

Five Whys

A Japanese procedure, originally developed by Sakichi Toyoda and used by Toyota, for getting at root causes by repeatedly asking 'Why?' until the true underlying causes are uncovered.

Short-term memory (STM)

The memory system that retains the most recent experiences or material currently being thought about, with a severely limited capacity (roughly three to five meaningful items) and fragility to distractions.

Working memory

An alternative name for short-term memory, emphasizing its active role in processing current information.

Rehearsing

Continually repeating material to retain it in short-term memory.

Mnemonics

Special techniques used by memory experts to remember amazingly large amounts of material, often by transforming arbitrary information into meaningful segments.

Long-term memory (LTM)

Memory for the past, which takes time for information to get into and time and effort to get out, and influences how experiences are reconstructed and interpreted.

Tip of the tongue experience

A phenomenon in memory retrieval where there is a feeling of knowing a name or word, but the knowledge is not consciously available.

Alfred North Whitehead

Philosopher and mathematician who famously stated that 'Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them'.

Prospective memory

The task of remembering to do some activity at a future time.

Memory for the future

A phrase that denotes planning abilities or the ability to imagine future scenarios, closely related to prospective memory.

Transactive memory

A concept coined by Daniel Wegner, describing the power of multiple minds working together, where each person adds their bit of knowledge to collectively remember things.

Cybermind

Daniel Wegner's term for seeking aids from technologies (like smart devices and the Internet) to answer questions, analogous to transactive memory but with technology.

Cultural constraints

Knowledge structures (schemas or scripts) containing general rules and information necessary for interpreting social situations and guiding behavior within a specific culture.

Schemas

Knowledge structures within the mind that contain general rules and information for interpreting situations and guiding behavior in stereotypical circumstances.

Scripts (cognitive science)

Specialized schemas that guide the sequence of behavior in stereotypical situations, like in a restaurant.

Erving Goffman

A sociologist who called the social constraints on acceptable behavior 'frames'.

Frames (sociology)

Social constraints on acceptable behavior that govern behavior even in novel situations or cultures.

Semantic constraints

Constraints that rely upon the meaning of the situation and our knowledge of the world to control the set of possible actions.

Logical constraints

Constraints that use logical relationships between the spatial or functional layout of components and their effects to limit possible actions, e.g., if one part is left over after assembly.

Convention

A special kind of cultural constraint, usually associated with how people behave, which provides valuable guidance for novel situations but can make change difficult.

Forcing functions

Forms of physical constraint where actions are constrained so that failure at one stage prevents the next step from happening, often used in safety engineering.

Interlocks

A type of forcing function that forces operations to take place in proper sequence, preventing unsafe actions without first completing necessary preparatory steps.

Dead man’s switch

An interlock used in safety settings that requires an operator to hold down a spring-loaded switch to enable equipment operation, stopping it if the operator dies or loses control.

Lock-in

A type of forcing function that keeps an operation active, preventing someone from prematurely stopping it, often by requiring confirmation before exiting or saving work.

Lockout

A type of forcing function that prevents someone from entering a space that is dangerous or prevents an event from occurring.

Skeuomorphic

The technical term for incorporating old, familiar ideas into new technologies, even though they no longer play a functional role, often easing the transition from old to new.

Swiss cheese model of accidents

A metaphor proposed by James Reason to explain that accidents usually have multiple causes, where an accident happens only if holes in multiple 'slices of cheese' (conditions or defenses) line up perfectly.

Sakichi Toyoda

Developer of the 'Five Whys' procedure used by the Toyota Motor Company for improving quality.

Human error

Any deviance from 'appropriate' behavior, which includes two major classes: slips and mistakes.

Slips

A class of human error that occurs when a person intends to do one action and ends up doing something else, due to flawed execution rather than an incorrect goal.

Mistakes

A class of human error that occurs when the wrong goal is established or the wrong plan is formed, even if the actions are executed properly according to the wrong plan.

Capture slip

A type of action-based slip where, instead of the desired activity, a more frequently or recently performed one gets done instead, requiring part of the action sequences to be identical.

Description-similarity slip

A type of action-based slip where the error is to act upon an item similar to the target because the description of the target is sufficiently vague, resulting in the correct action on the wrong object.

Memory-lapse slips

A type of slip caused by memory failures, such as failing to do all steps of a procedure, repeating steps, forgetting an outcome, or forgetting a goal/plan, often triggered by interruptions.

Mode error

A type of slip that occurs when a device has different states (modes) in which the same controls have different meanings, leading to confusion when the user believes the system is in one mode but it is in another.

Jens Rasmussen

A Danish engineer who distinguished among three modes of behavior: skill-based, rule-based, and knowledge-based.

Skill-based behavior

Behavior that occurs when workers are extremely expert at their jobs, allowing them to do everyday, routine tasks with little or no conscious attention, where the most common form of errors are slips.

Rule-based behavior

Behavior that occurs when the normal routine is no longer applicable but the new situation is known, so a well-prescribed course of action (a rule) is followed.

Knowledge-based behavior

Behavior required when unfamiliar events occur where neither existing skills nor rules apply, necessitating considerable reasoning and problem-solving at the reflective level.

Rule-based mistakes

Mistakes that occur when the situation is mistakenly interpreted, an inappropriate rule is chosen, the correct rule is faulty, or the outcome is incorrectly evaluated.

Knowledge-based mistakes

Mistakes that occur when knowledge-based behavior is required, typically due to an unknown situation or when familiar tasks go wrong, often resulting from misdiagnosis of the problem itself.

Andon

A special cord used in Toyota's Jidoka system that workers pull to stop the assembly line and alert an expert crew when something is wrong.

Poka-yoke

A Japanese method, invented by Shigeo Shingo, meaning 'error proofing' or 'avoiding error,' which involves adding simple fixtures, jigs, or devices to constrain operations so they are correct.

NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS)

An extremely effective system for encouraging pilots to submit semi-anonymous reports of errors without fear of punishment, leading to numerous improvements in aviation safety.

Baruch Fischhoff

A psychologist who studied explanations given in hindsight, demonstrating that events seem completely obvious and predictable after the fact but were unpredictable beforehand.

Hindsight

The phenomenon where events seem completely obvious and predictable after the fact, studied by Baruch Fischhoff.

Undo command

A powerful tool in modern electronic systems to reverse operations, thereby minimizing the impact of errors.