The Design of Everyday Things: Chapter 2

Donald Norman again has impressed me with his thorough understanding of design as an individual consumer and as the teacher. The Design of Everyday Things (DOET) is increasingly becoming a self-guide -- rather a self-help book -- for me. Whereas in Chapter 1 he stresses the importance of attributing failures to the design of the product and not ourselves and introduced some design principals, Chapter 2 delves deeper into the thinking processes necessary to develop a quality-designed product. 

One of the central themes I enjoy in Norman's book is how he addresses the psychology behind "human error" and "product error." Not only does he use specific examples of minuscule errors in product design (e.g. threading film into a projector) and major errors (e.g. the failure of all three plane engines during a flight), Norman actually utilizes psychology terminology and explanations. For instance, he describes the phenomenon of learned helplessness and taught helplessness, both of which I believe everyone has experienced at some point. He applies this discussion of how we attribute errors (and successes) to external and internal objects to the necessary thought-process of execution and evaluation. 

All of what he describes in Chapter 1 (i.e. visibility, a good conceptual model and mapping, feedback) are tied into the discussion of Chapter 2, leading to the Seven Stages of Action:

1. Forming the goal
2. Forming the intention
3. Specifying an action
4. Executing the action
5. Perceiving the state of the world
6. Interpreting the state of the world
7. Evaluating the outcome

In conjunction to what I have learned in class, I apply these principles to the new Multi-function Devices (MFDs) at Wellesley in the next blog post.