Don Norman's jnd.org / essays

Design

Why is 37signals so arrogant?

David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals says: "I'm not designing software for other people, I'm designing it for me." Wow. That is the sort of arrogance that the design community clustered around 37signals disdains -- or so I thought. Understanding the true needs of customers is essential for business success. Making sure the product is elegant, functional and understandable is also essential. The disdain for customers shown by Hansson of 37signals is an arrogance bound to fail. As long as 37signals is a hobby, where programmers code for themselves, it may very well succeed as a small enterprise with its current size of 10 employees. I'm happy for them, and for the numerous small developers and small companies that find their products useful. But their attitude is a symbol: a symbol of eventual failure. Too bad. In fact, that attitude is not so much arrogance as it is selfishness: they are selfish. A little less arrogance and a lot more empathy would turn these brilliant programmers into a brilliant company, a brilliant success.

Waiting: A Necessary Part of Life

Interaction design is about interfaces, which means it is about synchronizing the events of different systems, about memories, buffers, queues and waiting rooms. Waiting is an unavoidable component of interfaces, an unavoidable part of life. Just as dirt collects in crevices, buffers collect in the interfaces between systems. It is their natural home, and life would not work without them. I have become fascinated by buffers. I see them everywhere I look. They cannot be escaped.

Filling Much Needed Holes

Many of our clever ethnographic and field methods are designed to find unmet needs. You know what? Most are far better off if they stay unmet.

Automobile in HCI's Future-2

The automobile industry is badly in need of guidance on human factors. Excellent people already work in the companies, but they suffer the problems faced within the consumer electronics and computer industries over the past few decades. This is an important arena, one where human-centered design skills are essential. But success will come only when our discipline can provide seasoned managers who know how to work across disciplines, with engineers, designers (stylists), manufacturing, marketing and, of course, upper management.

Simplicity Is Highly Overrated

Yes, we want simplicity, but we don’t want to give up any of those cool features. Simplicity is highly overrated.

Cautious Cars & Cantankerous Kitchens

Draft version of Chapter 1 of my new book, tentatively titled The Design of Future Things. (In press: Basic Books. Expected publication: 2007.) This chapter is called "Cautious cars and cantankerous kitchens." Posted December 9, 2006 as a Microsoft Word file.

The truth about Google's so-called "simplicity"

The truth? It isn't simple. Why does it look simple? Because you can only do one thing from their home page: search. If you want to do one of the many other things Google is able to do, oops, first you have to figure out how to find it, then you have to figure out which of the many offerings to use, then you have to figure out how to use it. And because all those other things are not on the home page but, instead, are hidden away in various mysterious places, extra clicks and operations are required for even simple tasks -- if you can remember how to get to them.

Trapped in a Lufthansa Airline Seat

I flew from Munich to Chicago in a brand new Lufthansa Airbus 340. (the 340-300 model, for those who keep track of such things). Ah, Lufthansa has gone to great lengths to improve their business class fittings. Indeed each seat comes with a 14 page manual. (Oops, 14 pages? That should be warning enough.) "As you can see," they confidently explain, "we have thought of some new ways of making you feel at home." Hah! Not my home, thank you. Please, not my home.

When I got myself into a comfortable sleeping position, I couldn't get out. Four times in all I was trapped, trapped inside an airline seat. Ah, the joys of a technology whose time has not yet come. Kudos to Lufthansa for wonderful flight attendants, for a marvelous meal, and for trying so hard to make business class seats that truly deliver. If it is the thought that counts, Lufthansa wins. If execution also matters, well, they have some debugging to do.

Industrial Design: Claims Without Substance

Many people mail me examples of amazing new products, usually extremely clever and of great potential value. But do they really work? Do they really solve problems? Nobody knows. The designers simply assert that they do. Claims are worthless unless backed up by data. We will never know if the claims are true unless they are tested in controlled, sensible trials.

A challenge to the Industrial Design profession: validate your claims. IDSA could take the lead, especially in their juried exhibits, by requiring submissions to be accompanied by proof. And Business Week: As the most prestigous reporter upon design and products, don't you have an obligation to truth and verification? After all, you require this from your reporting staff. Why not from your awards?

Design as Communication

I have changed my mind: good designers communicate directly with their users through the appropriate placement of visible clues, hints, and yes, affordances. Once we start to view design as a form of communication between designer and the user, we see that perceived affordances become an important medium for that communication. Designed affordances play a very special role. Now we see that the designer deliberately places signs and signals on the artifact to communicate with the user. Affordances therefore signify intentions and reasons. They provide a story. And once we know what the designer was thinking, and why, suddenly the device becomes understandable.

Ad-Hoc Personas & Empathetic Focus

A Persona is a valuable design concept, aiding the designer in maintaining an "empathetic focus," providing a common language for communication among the diverse groups who work on a product -- different product groups, engineers, usability specialists, designers, marketing, and executives.

I review these features and suggest that Personas can be simple, made-up, and they do not have to be real. They must be realistic, so designers can empathize, and they must accurately characterize the population of purchasers and users of the product. Aside from that, I argue, exhaustive prior research and development for each Persona is not only unnecessary, it is probably a waste of resources.

(This essay, I predict, will be highly controversial.)

When Bugs Become Features

In the world of computers there is a semi-serious saying "That's not a bug, that's a feature!" which refers to the fact that one can often disguise a bug -- a mistake in design or in programming -- as a "feature" -- claiming that it is worthwhile and even deliberate. (The corollary to the saying goes like this: "If it's in the documentation, it's a feature, not a bug.") Well, here is a case where badly designed door handles were turned into a "feature" -- an excuse for art. Rather than do the door properly -- use different kinds of handles on each side of the door -- they have used the confusion as an excuse to create art -- where the art is almost as confusing as the original, but at least is aesthetically pleasing and even a source of conversation.

Activity-Centered Design: Why I like my Harmony Remote Control

July 2003. Most remote controls for watching video and controlling a home theater are device-centered so the task of turning on all the right equipment and setting each to just the right setting is daunting. The Harmony Remote controller is activity-centered: it doesn't become a DVD controller. Instead, it allows you to do the activity of "watching a DVD." The difference is enormous -- and wonderful to behold. Activity-centered design. It works. The first remote control I can recommend without hesitation.

Applying the Behavioral, Cognitive, and Social Sciences to Products

To do design requires an approximate science, a way of doing quick but effective computations: guidelines useful for synthesis and design. Applied discipolines have different needs than scientific ones. Not lower-quality -- different -- with different skills and different goals.

Affordances and Design

In the world of design, the term "affordance" has taken on a life far beyond the original meaning. It might help if we return to the original definition. Let me try to clarify the definition of the term and its many uses.

Affordance, Conventions and Design (Part 2)

The Psychology of Everyday Things (POET) was about "perceived affordance." If I ever were to revise POET, I would make a global change, replacing all instances of the word "affordance" with the phrase "perceived affordance." The designer cares more about what actions the user perceives to be possible than what is true. Moreover, affordances, both real and perceived, play very different roles in physical products than they do in the world of screen-based products. In the latter case, affordances play a relatively minor role: cultural conventions are much more important

Banner Blindness, Human Cognition and Web Design

Benway and Lane have studied "Banner Blindness" -- the fact that people tend to ignore those big, flashy, colorful banners at the top of web pages. This is pretty interesting stuff, for the entire reason they are so big and obnoxious is to attract attention, yet they fail. Evidently nobody ever studied real users before -- they simply assumed that big, colorful items were visible. This paper, shows once again the importance of observations over logic when it comes to predicting human behavior.

Design as Practiced

Design as practiced is considerably different from design as idealized in academic discussions of "good design." Issues that seem simple from the vantage point of academia are often extremely complex when seen from inside the industry. Indeed, the two sides seem hardly to be speaking the same language. In the course of my experiences, I have come to recognize that industry faces numerous problems that are outside of the scope of the traditional analyses of design.

Commentary: Human Error and the Design of Computer Systems

Many advances have been made in our understanding of the hardware and software of information processing systems, but one major gap remains: the inclusion of the human operator into the system analysis. The behavior of an information processing system is not a product of the design specifications: it is a product of the interaction between the human and the system.

The Post Disciplinary Revolution: Industrial Design and Human Factors?Heal Yourselves

Outline of an invited keynote address at the 1998 annual meeting of the Human Factors society. They hated it.

Usability Is Not a Luxury

If the customer can't find it, then the customer can't buy it. This simple statement explains why usability is the lifeline of e-commerce.

Emotion & Design

Why doing user observations first is wrong

How many times have you had to fight hard for the ability to do field studies and other observations at the very start of the project? How many times have you patiently explained that taking time now would be rewarded by faster time to market overall? And how many times were you successful? The HCI community has long complained about product processes that do not allow time to start with good observations.

The more I examine this issue, the more I think that it is we, the HCI community, who are wrong. This includes me, for I have long championed the “study first, design second” approach. Well, I now suggest that for many projects the order is design, then study.

Emotional Design: People and Things

Products differ in their appeal on the three design dimensions, but so too do people and situations. Vegetable peelers are primarily bought for their behavior. Wall clocks might be bought for visceral appeal or reflective image. Some people are behavioral, some are visceral. Some reflective, considering what others will think -- although it is the rare person who will admit to this behavior.

Affect and machine design: Lessons for the development of autonomous machines (with Andrew Ortony and Dan Russell). (August, 2002)

(Norman, D. A., Ortony, A., & Russell, D. M. (2003). Affect and machine design: Lessons for the development of autonomous machines. IBM Systems Journal, 42 (1), 38-44..

Originally presented at the IBM Autonomic Computing Summit at T J Watson Research Center, May 14-15, 2002)

Abstract

Human beings have evolved a rich and sophisticated set of processes for engaging with the world in which cognition and affect play two different but equal roles. Both cognition and affect can be thought of as systems for information processing. One, that of cognition, interprets and makes sense of the world. The other, affect, evaluates and judges. The affective system modulates the operating parameters of cognition and provides warning of possible dangers, thereby enhancing survivability and reliability. The study of how these two systems work together provides guidance for the design of complex autonomous systems that must deal with a variety tasks in a dynamic and often unpredictable environment.

Emotion & Design: Attractive things work better

June 2002. (Also published as Norman, D. A. (2002). Emotion and design: Attractive things work better. Interactions Magazine, ix (4), 36-42). Advances in our understanding of emotion and affect have implications for the science of design. Affect changes the operating parameters of cognition: positive affect enhances creative, breadth-first thinking whereas negative affect focuses cognition, enhancing depth-first processing and minimizing distractions. Therefore, it is essential that products designed for use under stress follow good human-centered design, for stress makes people less able to cope with difficulties and less flexible in their approach to problem solving. Positive affect makes people more tolerant of minor difficulties and more flexible and creative in finding solutions. Products designed for more relaxed, pleasant occasions can enhance their usability through pleasant, aesthetic design. Aesthetics matter: attractive things work better.

Auto Interiors

Dashboards for the Passengers

Drivers have dashboards. But what about the passengers, both in the front and rear seats? Why shouldn’t they too have dashboards? Today, we need places to store and plug in a wide variety of devices: music and video players, game machines and controllers, earphones, cellphones, and computers. Each needs a safe, secure place to be docked, each needs electrical power, and some need to be networked to one another. Someday soon many will need internet connections. And the same facilities have to be provided separately for everyone: the driver, the front passengers and the rear passengers (and in larger vehicles, the third-row passengers). Yes, passengers need dashboards too. One dashboard for each passenger.

Motorist trapped in traffic circle 14 hours

April 1. Hampstead, MA. Motorist Peter Newone said he felt as if a nightmare had just ended. Newone, 53, was driving his newly purchased luxury car when he entered the traffic circle in the city center around 9 AM yesterday, Friday. The car was equipped with the latest safety features, including a new feature called Lane Keeping. "It just wouldn’t let me get out of the circle," said Newone.

A Time For Standards

Standards committees face daunting tasks. Nonetheless, the time has come for this one. If we do not standardize the nature of the warning systems, we are apt to create as much harm as good with these systems. We need functional standards that specify the forms by which signals might be given, the nature of the automatic operations that will be performed, and to standardize the controls and displays, so that even drivers new to a vehicle can understand the warning, know what actions to expect, and know how to read the displays and modify their settings. Today, we have a hodge-podge of methods. Hodge-podges and safety do not go hand in hand.

A Car Is for Entertainment

Let’s face it, the car isn’t just for driving anymore, it’s for almost anything you can imagine (and probably some things you’d rather not). As if the interior design team’s job weren’t difficult enough, not only must they make a safe, comfortable interior, but it must be alluring, inviting, and suitable for a wide variety of activities, many of which are in conflict with one another, let alone with safety and comfort. The car is rapidly becoming an entertainment center.

Complexity again -- Isn't progress wonderful?

Today we can start the car with ease. But our intrepid automobile interior design teams have compensated for that simplicity. Now you have to learn how to open the doors, how to operate the temperature controls, how to change radio stations. We used to have to take classes to start the engine. Today we need lessons to set the clock. Isn’t progress wonderful?

Interior Design Versus Product Design

To an outsider like me, someone versed in the field of product design, especially that of high-technology, the world of automotive interior design seems very different, very anachronistic. One theme of this issue is the influence of Product Design, so let me compare that world with automobile interior design.

Complexity of the Modern Automobile-Isn't Progress Wonderful?

There's an Automobile in HCI's Future

Consider the modern automobile. It is a wonder of computation. multiple CPUs, hundreds of miles of cabling. Automatic this and automatic that. Lots of automatic stuff. How do we automate sensibly, controlling some parts of the driving experience, but ensuring that drivers are kept alert and informed -- "in the loop" is the way this is described in aviation safety. The current designs for automobile automation are being done by engineers who are ignorant of the lessons learned from studies of automation. Here we go again. Each new industry fails to learn the lessons of the previous ones. So, once again, here is a field in desperate need of help, yet not quite realizing it. A field with new lessons to learn, and a lot of very old lessons that have to be taught once again.

Universal Design & Auto Design: We Are Getting Older

I recently watched an elderly lady struggle to extricate herself from the front seat of a car. "Now there is a huge opportunity," I said to myself, "we live in an aging society, yet we still design for the young and able. Why not address this huge, important market?"

There is a tendency to shy away from designing for the impaired. This is a special-interest group, it is feared, one that will drive away other customers. Wrong. Designs intended to make life easier for the elderly or handicapped can be useful for everyone.

Emotional Autos

DONALD A. NORMAN Originally published in InteriorMotives. You are driving along, about to change lanes, when your car suddenly tenses up. The seatbelts tighten. The seat straightens up, the headrest moves forward. As you turn the wheel to the right, the car starts quivering, buzzing from the right side. “Calm down, ” you say, “I know what I’m doing. ” A nervous, skittish car? A car distrustful of its driver? Sure, why not? Cars are getting real personalities and emotions. No, I don’t mean the cutesy descriptions by people who look at the body lines, hood ornaments and grills. No, I mean real emotions somewhat akin to that of people and animals. Personality and emotions have long been talked about in the design business, but usually as metaphors. Numerous companies and research laboratories are trying to determine the mood of the driver, the better to react appropriately. But I’m not...

Concept Cars

Concept cars play an important role in the automobile industry. These exercises are great opportunities to test potential designs. Originally, these were pure explorations in style -- an excuse to let the stylists display their creative juices before returning to the mundane world of production models. But over time, the ideas have developed into a combination of exploration and show. Sometimes the original intention to explore design themes has been taken over by the public relations crew, so the result is an attempt to impress the car-buying public, the press, the executive suite, and, just perhaps, rival designers at competitive companies, which especially means designers of different models within the same company.

Some recent examples of concept cars (e.g., from Volvo, GM, and MIT/GM) are insightful, creative, and powerful. And some (e.g., from Ford) are just plain silly.

Facing to the rear

When I travel in cars, I am a passenger as often as I am a driver. Passengers seem poorly served by the design of most automobile interiors. Why not allow the front seat to face to the rear? Now, suddenly, the front and rear passengers are united. Will passengers dislike it? Suppose it were optional -- great when there is conversation between rear and front, optional otherwise.

Navigation Systems

Navigation systems can quickly become essential components of driving, especially in unfamiliar locations. They invoke strong feelings among those who use them, but alas, much in the same way we relate to our computers: love and hate seem to alternate. Now that I have experienced them in my own cars, I never want to be without them, except for when I want to throw them out the window.

Cockpit Complexity

The automobile industry is doing a poor job of designing interior controls -- they are overly complex, difficult to understand, and therefore dangerous to use while driving. It is time to use human-centered design.

The Personality of Automobiles

Every car has a unique personality, much like every person, and with cars as with people, we infer the personality from three components: visceral, which is mainly looks; behavioral, which is mainly behavior; and reflective, which is mainly reputation.

The Emotional Eye (pun Intended): Introductions

My introductory column for InteriorMotives. July/August 2004. In this column I introduce myself.

Interaction articles

Waiting: A Necessary Part of Life

A Fetish for Numbers: Hospital Care

I've been spending a lot of time in hospitals recently. No, not as a patient, as an observer — following doctors and nurses on their grand rounds, watching patients get admitted, nurses doing shift changes, pharmacists filling prescriptions, and then watching nurses actually deliver the prescribed medication to their patients, waving barcode readers over the prescriptions, the medication, and the patients. The modern hospital is a complex system, with multiple complex interactions among people, equipment, laws, institutions, and a confusing wealth of information. It is time to turn our attention to the multiple interfaces and design issues within this complex system. Healthcare is a problem that needs immediate attention. We need to start now, for the issues are life-threatening.

Filling Much Needed Holes

Many of our clever ethnographic and field methods are designed to find unmet needs. You know what? Most are far better off if they stay unmet.

Automobile in HCI's Future-2

UI Breakthroughs-2-Physicality

We have evolved as physical creatures. We live in a complex, three-dimensional world filled with physical objects. We are analog beings in an artificial world of digital devices, devices that abstract what is powerful and good from the physical world and turn it into information spaces, usually in arbitrary ways. These new approaches put the body back into the picture. They require us to control through physical action, which means through mechanical devices, not electronic or graphic, through physical rather than virtual.

UI Breakthrough-Command Line Interfaces

Want to know what I think the next UI breakthroughs will be? Here is one: Command line languages. Did you think they were dead? Forever vanguished by graphical user interaces? Think again. Search engines have added command structures, and now these have migrated to the desktop. The new command line interfaces still have a way to go. They have appeared serendipitously, as system developers slowly expanded the capabilities of search tools. But now it is time to recognize them for what they are – and for how much better they could become.

Command line interfaces. Once that was all we had. Then they disappeared, replaced by what we thought was a great advance: GUIs. GUIs were – and still are – valuable, but they fail to scale to the demands of today’s systems. So now command line interfaces are back again, hiding under the name of search. Now you see them, now you don’t. Now you see them again. And they will get better and better with time: mark my words, that is my prediction for the future of interfaces.

Simplicity Is Highly Overrated

Yes, we want simplicity, but we don’t want to give up any of those cool features. Simplicity is highly overrated.

Three Challenges for Design

The invisible, ubiquitous computer has arrived, ensnaring almost any conceivable activity within its grasp. This raises wonderful opportunities and challenges to the field of human-computer interaction, for if the computer is everywhere, then everything is within our domain of study.

It is time to consider where the next application areas might be. As I look to the future, I see numerous domains of concern, but with three large, overriding issues:

The ever-increasing complexity of everyday things
The ever-increasing burden of security, authentication, and identification
The ever-increasing use of automation

Logic Versus Usage: The Case for Activity-Centered Design

In my consulting activities, I often have to explain to companies that they are too logical, too rational. Human behavior seldom follows mathematical logic and reasoning. By the standards of engineers, human behavior can be illogical and irrational. From the standpoint of people, however, their behavior is quite sensible, dictated by the activity being performed, the environment and context, and their higher-level goals. Activity-centered design organizes according to usage: traditional human-centered design organizes according to topic, in isolation, outside the context of real, everyday use. Both are needed.

Words Matter. Talk About People: Not Customers, Not Consumers, Not Users

Words matter. Psychologists depersonalize the people they study by calling them “subjects.” We depersonalize the people we study by calling them “users.” Both terms are derogatory. They take us away from our primary mission: to help people. Power to the people, I say, to repurpose an old phrase. People. Human Beings. That’s what our discipline is really about.

Why doing user observations first is wrong

Emotionally-centered design

Web 2.0 is coming. Rich Internet applications (RIA) are here. Hurrah! The internet has caught up with the desktop, at long last. As a result, they provide some natural experiments in emotionally-attractive websites, allowing us to contrast the more traditional, static html page website with these more interactive, dynamic ones, where there are natural controls for information content, utility, and usability. So let’s see what we can learn from them. In this exploration, I concentrate on map websites because they provide the ingredients for appropriate comparisons. We are moving from static pages with their clunky, slow repainting of the page to fluid, dynamic displays, where the movement is a major part of the charm. We are moving from behaviorally effective designs to ones that add emotional engagement.

Interaction Design is still an art form: Ergonomics is real engineering

The practice of HCI is mainly still an art form. The practice of Ergonomics is a rigorous engineering field. OK, so I oversimplified in order to get your attention, but listen up: there is a lot of truth in that simplification.

To school or not to school

To school or not to school, is that the question? Should you go back to school? Whatever you do, remember that you must continually be learning. It is essential to keep up with rapidly evolving practices, with new technologies, procedures, business models, markets, and so on. So no matter what your schooling, make sure you are always engaged. Go to all the talks, seminars, and meetings you can. Attend national conferences. Subscribe to the journals and magazines and newsletters. Often these will disappoint or even bore you, but stick to it. You will be surprised how your sophistication grows over time, even though no single event seems responsible. When I go to a five-day conference, if I get one new insight, that makes it worthwhile. One insight after five days? Yup. Insights are rare. One or two a year, and that is a rich life. To school or not to school is a question only you can answer.

Whose profession is design?

Designing a product requires many skills, and it is the rare individual who has them all. Design is, therefore, an exercise in teamwork, where each team member brings in a different mix of skills, attitudes, and values. Alas, quite often, members think their own set of attributes is the most important. Whose profession is this, anyway? Nobody’s and everybody’s. We are all in it together, we all need one another.

Trapped In a Lufthansa Airline Seat

I consider it part of my self-imposed job requirement to purchase and try out every new technology. How else am to know the pleasure – and trauma – associated with their potential and their realization? My experiences demonstrate the need for the field of HCI expand its horizons far beyond that of the traditional computer. This essay gives one example.

HCD harmful? A Clarification

Many have had difficulty with my article "Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful"

In particular, I failed to make clear what I meant by "Activity-Centered Design," (ACD) and how it differs from "Human-Centered Design"(HCD). Some people think I have renounced everything I have said before. No, no, no. So, this short note tries to clarify.

There's an Automobile in HCI's Future

Do companies fail because their technology is unusable?

Wonderful user experience is important, but neither necessary nor sufficient. If the company fails, it doesn’t matter how good the experience was. For us, as a discipline, to be successful, we need to understand the entire picture. Our job is to make the company succeed.

Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful

Human-Centered Design has become such a dominant theme in design that it is now accepted by interface and application designers automatically, without thought, let alone criticism. That’s a dangerous state — when things are treated as accepted wisdom. The purpose of this essay is to provoke thought, discussion, and reconsideration of some of the fundamental principles of Human-Centered Design. These principles, I suggest, can be helpful, misleading, or wrong. At times, they might even be harmful. Activity-Centered Design is superior.

Robots in the Home: What Might They Do?

Robots are coming, but what does this mean to ordinary folks? First of all, don't believe all the hype. Three likely directions for the future are entertainment, home appliances, and education. We can start with today's existing devices and slowly add on intelligence, manipulative ability, and function. Start small and build. The market for robots that entertain by being cute and cuddly is already well established. The second generation of vacuum cleaners is smarter than the first. Sony's dog gets smarter and less expensive with each new version. We don't yet think of washing machines, microwave ovens, and coffee makers as robots, but why not? They don't move around the house, but they are getting better and smarter every year. And when the coffee maker is connected to the pantry and dishwasher, that will be a home robot worthy of the name: same for the coupling of sorting, washing, drying, and storing clothes. Education is a powerful possibility. There is already a solid basis of educational devices that aid learning. Today's robots can read aloud in engaging voices. They can be cute and lovable — witness the responses to the multiple quasi-intelligent animals on the toy market. A robot could very well interact with a child, offering educational benefits as well. Why not have the robot help the child learn the alphabet, teach reading, vocabulary, pronunciation, basic arithmetic, maybe basic reasoning? Why not music and art, geography and history? And why restrict it to children?

Interaction Design for Automobile Interiors

The automobile industry is ignoring all the advances in user-interface design, and all the lessons about safety. Unlike home computers where bad design is simply a nuisance, with automobiles, bad design can be a major safety issue.

Technology & Society

Waiting: A Necessary Part of Life

Filling Much Needed Holes

Many of our clever ethnographic and field methods are designed to find unmet needs. You know what? Most are far better off if they stay unmet.

Automobile in HCI's Future-2

Cautious Cars & Cantankerous Kitchens

Full-scale maps: Cartography dream realized

Cambridge, UK. 1 April 2006. An old dream of cartographers has finally been realized through flat-panel displays and small, portable computational devices. For centuries, cartographers have dreamed of full-scale maps, that is, a map with a scale of 1:1, so that 1 Km. of the map would represent 1 Km. of the world. Implementation difficulties made such a map impractical. But now, scientists at Cambridge University have been able to display the full-scale map on a flat-panel screen, scrolling the map as necessary to cover the territory.

Motorist trapped in traffic circle 14 hours

Things That Make Us Smart: Forbes article

Forbes.com published a series of articles on "the 20 tools which have had the biggest impact on human civilization." They asked me to be on their advisory board.

"Writing," I proclaimed. "The invention of writing is probably the most important tool for human advancement, making it possible for each new generation to build upon the work of the previous, to transmit knowledge from person to person, across cultures and time."

"Sorry," came back the response. "We decided early on to try to limit the list to handheld objects that could be physically manipulated to complete a task.”

So I advised them. But here is the real essay, the one I wanted to write, but which they rejected.

How To Write an Effective Manual

Erin Massey of the Chicago Tribune newspaper (registration required) has written a nice article on the importance of product manuals. Although she interviewed me and included several quotations, she missed the most important lessons of all. So let me provide them here.

Problem of Automation: Inappropriate feedback and interaction, not over-automation

As automation increasingly takes its place in industry it is often blamed for causing harm and increasing the chance of human error when failures occur. I propose that the problem is not the presence of automation, but rather its inappropriate design. The problem is that the operations under normal operating conditions are performed appropriately, but there is inadequate feed back and interaction with the humans who must control the overall conduct of the task. When the situations exceed the capabilities of the automatic equipment, then the inadequate feedback leads to difficulties for the human controllers.

This essay was published 15 years ago, but it is still relevant, especially as more and more automation moves into the auto industry.

Do companies fail because their technology is unusable?

Trapped in a Lufthansa Airline Seat

In Defense of PowerPoint

It has become commonplace to rail against the evils of PowerPoint talks; you know, those dull, boring never-ending ordeals where the speaker — or should I say "reader" — displays what appears to be a never-ending progression of slides, each with numerous bulleted points, sometimes coming on to the screen from unexpected directions in unexpected ways, each one being slowly read to the audience. PowerPoint should be banned, cries the crowd. Edward Tufte credits poor PowerPoint slides with contributing to the Columbia space shuttle disaster.

Is PowerPoint bad? No, in fact, it is quite a useful tool. Boring talks are bad. Poorly structured talks are bad. Don't blame the problem on the tool.

Is PowerPoint responsible for the Columbia disaster? Don't be silly. The PowerPoint slides reflected the judgment of the committee. The critical point was in small type because the committee thought it unimportant. The surprise is that they included it at all — which implies to me that they were trying to be as complete and honest as they could. They were not trying to deceive.

Bad talks are bad, whether or not they use PowerPoints. And good talks are good, even when they do use PowerPoint—sometimes because they do use PowerPoint, but only if they use it properly and appropriately.

Minimizing the annoyance of the mobile phone

We are in real danger of a consumer backlash against annoying technologies. We already have seen the growth of mobile-phone free zones, of prohibition against phone use, camera use, camera phones, in all sort of public and private places. The mobile phone has been shown to be a dangerous distraction to the driver of an automobile, whether hands-free or not. If we do nothing to overcome these problems, then the benefits these technologies bring may very well be denied us because the social costs are simply too great.

Technology provides many virtues to modern life, but at some societal costs. If we do not attend to the societal costs, they may cause legal restrictions on the use of the technology. Why not address them proactively, using the technology itself to fight the problems?

Robots in the Home: What Might They Do?

Appliances of the Future

We have truly reached the era of "The Invisible Computer." In the office and home, automobile and school, embedded computers make our lives more enjoyable.

We face a fascinating future, with much exciting new technology, many new information appliances. We should not have to know how they work. We should not need to know anything about their technology. All we have to know is our job and what we are tying to accomplish. The appliances simply work: they provide the information we need when we need it, effortlessly, without any effort on our part. Smart things, cyborgs, and emotional things: the future will indeed be different.

Where Emotional Design Fails

I suppose I ought to be pleased. The phrase "Emotional Design" is pervasive, with consumer products of all forms touting the virtues of the emotions.

Beauty is contextual. For the objects in our home that we must live with, the context matters. All these new, spectacular designs for television sets, computers, audio loudspeakers, and other appliances are wonderful in the showroom or museum. But in the house, they clash. we don't live in museums. Most of us do not live with shining steel and glass furniture. The beauty is inappropriate for everyday lives. It clashes.

Designers of the world: Beauty is nice. But fitting in even nicer. Let's return to human-centered design, to appropriate design.

With safety and security, more can be less

Adding more security and safety measures can actually decrease security and safety. This is for four reasons: one technical, the other three a result of psychology.

1. Common-mode problems

2. The "shirking" problem (also known to psychologists as "bystander apathy").

3. The overcompensation problem.

4: The Dedicated Worker problem.

Originally published in "Risks Digest." Points one-three from a paper by Scott Sagan. Point four is mine.

The Complexity of Everyday Life

My home is littered with technologies that require conitnual attention. The problem is not just with today's favorite culprit -- the computer -- even my water filter requires change every 6 months. If every device only needed attention once a year, I would still be fixing, maintaining, or adjusting something every day. And these devices require more than yearly maintenance -- some are daily, some monthly -- and with the computer, it can be several times a day. Where will it end?

Cyborgs of the New Millennium

To date, the way we interact with computers is incredibly unimaginative and limited. Basically, we sit in front of the box looking and listening, pointing and typing, and occasionally talking. Will this change? Of course, but I believe the change will come about primarily by changes in the computer itself, getting rid of the boxes and embedding them into devices and appliances.

The Life Cycle of a Technology: Why it is so difficult for large companies to innovate

As I wrote "The Invisible Computer," I was struck by a paradox. On the one hand, there is very substantial agreement that ease of use and understandability are important. Similarly, good industrial design, simple, short documentation, and convenient, pleasing products are superior. I wondered why, if ease of use and understandability seems to important, On the other hand, much of the computer technology today violates all these things, yet the companies prosper. . . . So why is it that good products can fail and inferior products can succeed?

Looking Forward to the 21st Century

It is time for technology to be quieter, calmer, and less visible. Let us make the 21st century be the time to hide the technology, to let it all become invisible. Just as the sewers and water pipes of the homes are invisible, yet still essential; or just as the electric wiring and electric motors throughout the home or office are ever present but beneath conscious awareness, let the computer technology become an enabling infrastructure: invisible, out of sight, out of mind, but ever more powerful.

Making Technology Invisible: A Conversation with Don Norman

My book "The Invisible Computer" explains the "why" of Information appliances � Eric Bergman's book, "Information Appliances and Beyond", explains the "how." This is Chapter One from the book.

Education

In Defense of Cheating

No, I am not in favor of deception, trickery, fraud, or swindle. What I wish to change are the curriculum and examination practices of our school systems that insist on unaided work, arbitrary learning of irrelevant and uninteresting facts. I'd like to move them toward an emphasis on understanding, on knowing how to get to an answer rather than knowing the answer, and on cooperation rather than isolation. Cheating that involves deceit is, of course wrong, but we should examine the school practices that lead to cheating: change the practices, and the deceit will naturally diminish.

The Future of Education: Lessons Learned from Video Games and Museum Exhibits

We will solve the fundamental problems only through social policy, through organizational change, and through deep understanding of organizations and the people who comprise and are served by them. We need to change the way we think about education, and through that understanding, change the way we do it.

Learning from the Success of Computer Games

We learn not by having our heads filled with the great thoughts and ideas of others, but by constructing them within our own conceptual structures. But this construction works best when the scenario is rigged so as to lead us to the ideas, to force us to confront them and understand them. This is what the successful game designer does. This is what the successful educator must do. More...

Technology and the Rise of the For-profit University

The traditional university is all things to all people, but it is primarily a place for professors to learn, to study, and yes, to teach. The teaching follows the traditional model of pouring knowledge into the heads of obedient students. This is a teacher-centered model of education, one that has repeatedly been shown to be inferior.

Television

DVD Menu Design: The Failures of Web Design Recreated Yet Again

It is time to take DVD design as seriously as we do web design. The field needs some discipline: Some attention to the User Experience, concern about accessibility for those with less than perfect sight and hearing, and some standardization of control and display formats.

The Perils of Home Theater

(Also published in IEEE's Computer magazine, June 2002). Anyone who thinks that the computer industry has made things difficult for customers, wait till you look at home theater. There is a major opportunity here to enlarge the market considerably by setting, agreeing upon, and implementing industry-wide standards for interconnection, aimed at making the result easier to install and use, far more comprehensible, and therefore more attractive to the average family.

Advanced TV Standards

We are in the midst of an interesting revolution, one that I am sure historians 200 years from now will call one of the more profound technological changes in written history. This revolution is really about social interaction, collaboration, and access to knowledge. It isn't about telephones or computers or television.

People

A Fetish for Numbers: Hospital Care

Cautious Cars & Cantankerous Kitchens

In Appreciation of Jef Raskin

Jef Raskin, a remarkable person, died recently (26 Feb., 2005). He led a rich life. I first met him when he was a professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in the early 1970s, and although his degree was in Music, he was a professor of Art, doing computer science, and art, and music, and well, you name it. He was an accomplished musician on multiple instruments, a conductor and composer, an artist with several major exhibits, an inventor of light-weight, radio controlled airplanes (and science editor of a model airplane magazine), a writer, inventor of the term "Information appliance" and one of the first example products thereof (The Canon Cat), and along the way, the person who started the Macintosh project at Apple computer.

Take a look at his latest work -- Archy -- which promises a radically different way to interact with our computers. Read Jef's book, examine the Archie site. And look for Jef’s new book, "The Humane Environment," now in development at Addison-Wesley.
A remarkable person: a remarkable set of achievements.

Toilet Paper Algorithms: I didn't know you had to be a computer scientist to use toilet paper.

April 2002: modified in June and August, 2002. ? When we remodeled our house, we put in dual-paper toilet roll holders so that we would always have a new roll when the old one ran out. Oops, they both ran out together. We discovered the algorithms of toilet paper use.

Being Analog 3 of 3

Part 3 of an essay on the fact that people are analog, hence fundamentally mismatched with contemporary requirements of digital devices (e.g., the computer).

Being Analog 2 of 3

Part 2 of a three-part essay on the fact that people are analog, hence fundamentally mismatched with contemporary requirements of digital devices (e.g., the computer).

Being Analog

Chapter 7 from The Invisible Computer ? 1998 ? We are analog beings trapped in a digital world, and the worst part is, we did it to ourselves.

How Might Humans Interact with Robots?

In developing an understanding of how humans interact with robots, we can draw our lessons from several disciplines:
1. Human-Computer Interaction
2. Automation in such areas as Aviation
3. Science fiction, e.g., Asimov's 4 laws of Robots
4. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
5. Human Consciousness, Emotion and Personality
All of these areas are valuable, but each stresses a different aspect of interaction so, in the end, we must draw lessons from all. In the case of robots, it turns out that although all these teach valuable lessons, they aren't enough: we still need more.

How Might People Interact with Agents

Published as: Norman, D. A. (1997). How might people interact with agents. In J. Bradshaw (Ed.), Software agents

Probably all the major software manufacturers are exploring the use of intelligent agents. Myths, promises, and reality are all colliding. But the main difficulties I foresee are social, not technical: How will intelligent agents interact with people and perhaps more important, how might people think about agents?

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