Quotes from Donald A. Norman

Don't these so-called advances also cause us to lose valuable mental skills? Each technological advance that provides a mental aid also brings along critics who decry the loss of the human skill that has been made less valuable. Fine, I say: if the skill is easily automated, it wasn't essential.

But in the world of sales, if a company were to make the perfect product, any other company would have to change it—which would make it worse—in order to promote its own innovation, to show that it was different.

In the 1980s, in writing The Design of Everyday Things, I didn't take emotions into account. I addressed utility and usability, function and form, all in a logical, dispassionate way—even though I am infuriated by poorly designed objects. But now I've changed. Why? In part because of new scientific advances in our understanding of the brain and of how emotion and cognition are thoroughly intertwined.

The debate is not useful. All groups are necessary. Customer research is a tradeoff: deep insights on real needs from a tiny set of people, versus broad, reliable purchasing data from a wide range and large number of people. We need both. Designers understand what people really need. Marketing understands what people actually buy. These are not the same things, which is why both approaches are required: marketing and design researchers should work together in complementary teams.

complex system: good design requires consideration of the

Effective memory uses all the clues available: knowledge in the world and in the head, combining world and mind. We have already seen how the combination allows us to function quite well in the world even though either source of knowledge, by itself, is insufficient.

Radical innovation is what many people seek, for it is the big, spectacular form of change. But most radical ideas fail, and even those that succeed can take decades and, as this chapter has already illustrated, they may take centuries to succeed.

Cognition attempts to make sense of the world: emotion assigns value. It is the emotional system that determines whether a situation is safe or threatening, whether something that is happening is good or bad, desirable or not. Cognition provides understanding: emotion provides value judgments. A human without a working emotional system has difficulty making choices. A human without a cognitive system is dysfunctional.

The standards should reflect the psychological conceptual models, not the physical mechanics.

We need to remove the word failure from our vocabulary, replacing it instead with learning experience. To fail is to learn: we learn more from our failures than from our successes.

The traditional measures of STM capacity range from five to seven, but from a practical point of view, it is best to think of it as holding only three to five items.

Suppose I try to use an everyday thing, but I can't. Who is at fault: me or the thing? We are apt to blame ourselves, especially if others are able to use it. Suppose the fault really lies in the device, so that lots of people have the same problems. Because everyone perceives the fault to be his or her own, nobody wants to admit to having trouble. This creates a conspiracy of silence, where the feelings of guilt and helplessness among people are kept hidden.

Predicting technology is relatively easy compared to predictions of human behavior, or in this case, the adoption of societal conventions. Will this prediction be true? You

Even systems that do not use menus need to provide some structure: appropriate constraints and forcing functions, natural good mapping, and all the tools of feedforward and feedback. The most effective way of helping people remember is to make it unnecessary.

Muchas equivocaciones se deben a caprichos del pensamiento humano, a menudo porque la gente tiende a fiarse de las experiencias que recuerda, en lugar de utilizar un análisis sistemático.

People invariably object and complain whenever a new approach is introduced into an existing array of products and systems. Conventions are violated: new learning is required. The merits of the new system are irrelevant: it is the change that is upsetting.

What is natural depends upon point of view, the choice of metaphor, and therefore, the culture. The design difficulties occur when there is a switch in metaphors. Airplane

At least my computer allows flexibility in type size; most do not.

Because we are all designers in the sense that all of us deliberately design our lives, our rooms, and the way we do things.

Why does inelegant design persist for so long? This is called the legacy problem, and it will come up several times in this book. Too many devices use the existing standard—that is the legacy. If the symmetrical cylindrical battery were changed, there would also have to be a major change in a huge number of products. The new batteries would not work in older equipment, nor the old batteries in new equipment. Microsoft

When people fail to follow these bizarre, secret rules, and the machine does the wrong thing, its operators are blamed for not understanding the machine, for not following its rigid specifications. With everyday objects, the result is frustration. With complex devices and commercial and industrial processes, the resulting difficulties can lead to accidents, injuries, and even deaths.

The sheer number of different reminder methods also indicates that there is indeed a great need for assistance in remembering, but that none of the many schemes and devices is completely satisfactory. After all, if any one of them was, then we wouldn't need so many. The less effective ones would disappear and new schemes would not continually be invented.

A conceptual model is an explanation, usually highly simplified, of how something works. It doesn't have to be complete or even accurate as long as it is useful.

Semantics is the study of meaning. Semantic constraints are those that rely upon the meaning of the situation to control the set of possible actions.