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835b584
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Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.
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Donald A. Norman |
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6684325
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Principles of design: 1. Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head. 2. Simplify the structure of tasks. 3. Make things visible: bridge gulfs between Execution and Evaluation. 4. Get the mappings right. 5. Exploit the power of constraints. 6. Design for error. 7. When all else fails, standardize.
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Donald A. Norman |
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4aebf43
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Rule of thumb: if you think something is clever and sophisticated beware-it is probably self-indulgence.
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Donald A. Norman |
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56113c9
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Learning should take place when it is needed, when the learner is interested, not according to some arbitrary, fixed schedule
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Donald A. Norman |
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f60b229
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Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible,
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Donald A. Norman |
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42c400e
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A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem.
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Donald A. Norman |
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d5071ce
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Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.
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Donald A. Norman |
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49e517f
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Fail often, fail fast,
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Donald A. Norman |
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d60376c
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The problem with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.
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Donald A. Norman |
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2760e34
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Cognition attempts to make sense of the world: emotion assigns value.
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Donald A. Norman |
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ba3a9d4
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The idea that a person is at fault when something goes wrong is deeply entrenched in society. That's why we blame others and even ourselves. Unfortunately, the idea that a person is at fault is imbedded in the legal system. When major accidents occur, official courts of inquiry are set up to assess the blame. More and more often the blame is attributed to "human error." The person involved can be fined, punished, or fired. Maybe training pr..
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Donald A. Norman |
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5905ca1
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The vicious cycle starts: if you fail at something, you think it is your fault. Therefore you think you can't do that task. As a result, next time you have to do the task, you believe you can't, so you don't even try. The result is that you can't, just as you thought.
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Donald A. Norman |
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647299c
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When things go right, people credit their own abilities and intelligence. The onlookers do the reverse. When they see things go well for someone else, they sometimes credit the environment, or luck.
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Donald A. Norman |
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32779a7
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We must design for the way people behave, not for how we would wish them to behave.
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inspirational
human-computer-interaction
interaction-design
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Donald A. Norman |
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dacf0e2
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Finally, people have to actually purchase it. It doesn't matter how good a product is if, in the end, nobody uses it.
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Donald A. Norman |
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d06c579
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The design of everyday things is in great danger of becoming the design of superfluous, overloaded, unnecessary things.
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Donald A. Norman |
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f833ef4
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Will robot teachers replace human teachers? No, but they can complement them. Moreover, the could be sufficient in situations where there is no alternative--to enable learning while traveling, or while in remote locations, or when one wishes to study a topic for which there is not easy access to teachers. Robot teachers will help make lifelong learning a practicality. They can make it possible to learn no matter where one is in the world, n..
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learning
robots
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Donald A. Norman |
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c92dcd2
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Simplification is as much in the mind as it is in the device.
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Donald A. Norman |
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02ac1e5
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A story tells of Henry Ford's buying scrapped Ford cars and having his engineers disassemble them to see which parts failed and which were still in good shape. Engineers assumed this was done to find the weak parts and make them stronger. Nope. Ford explained that he wanted to find the parts that were still in good shape. The company could save money if they redesigned these parts to fail at the same time as the others.
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Donald A. Norman |
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2d6ab99
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It is easy to design devices that work well when everything goes as planned. The hard and necessary part of design is to make things work well even when things do not go as planned.
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Donald A. Norman |
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d6415e6
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One way of overcoming the fear of the new is to make it look like the old.
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Donald A. Norman |
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3479251
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Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.
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Donald A. Norman |
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c344f69
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Norman's Law: The day the product team is announced, it is behind schedule and over its budget.
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Donald A. Norman |
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d1b051b
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original ideas are the easy part. Actually producing the idea as a successful product is what is hard.
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Donald A. Norman |
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fdf9859
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In design, one of the most difficult activities is to get the specifications right:
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Donald A. Norman |
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3eba6cf
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In the university, professors make up artificial problems. In the real world, the problems do not come in nice, neat packages. They have to be discovered.
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Donald A. Norman |
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be1e3c9
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If designers and researchers do not sometimes fail, it is a sign that they are not trying hard enough--they are not thinking the great creative thoughts that will provide breakthroughs in how we do things. It is possible to avoid failure, to always be safe. But that is also the route to a dull, uninteresting life.
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Donald A. Norman |
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2661eb5
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Forget the complaints against complexity; instead, complain about confusion.
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Donald A. Norman |
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742a00a
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With the passage of time, the psychology of people stays the same, but the tools and objects in the world change.
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Donald A. Norman |
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0587820
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Because retrieval is a reconstructive process, it can be erroneous. We may reconstruct events the way we would prefer to remember them, rather than the way we experienced them. It is relatively easy to bias people so that they form false memories, "remembering" events in their lives with great clarity, even though they never occurred. This is one reason that eyewitness testimony in courts of law is so problematic: eyewitnesses are notorious..
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Donald A. Norman |
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9f2491c
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Poor feedback can be worse than no feedback at all, because it is distracting, uninformative, and in many cases irritating and anxiety-provoking.
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Donald A. Norman |
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8c5bca6
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Why do we need to know about the human mind? Because things are designed to be used by people, and without a deep understanding of people, the designs are apt to be faulty, difficult to use, difficult to understand.
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Donald A. Norman |
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1647334
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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. It is time to reverse the situation: to cast the blame up..
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Donald A. Norman |
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85572b4
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It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.
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Donald A. Norman |
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5ff3e42
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Affordances define what actions are possible. Signifiers specify how people discover those possibilities: signifiers are signs, perceptible signals of what can be done. Signifiers are of far more importance to designers than are affordances.
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Donald A. Norman |
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50e97cd
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Fire," yells someone in a theater. Immediately everyone stampedes toward the exits. What do they do at the exit door? Push. If the door doesn't open, they push harder. But what if the door opens inward and must be pulled, not pushed? Highly anxious, highly focused people are very unlikely to think of pulling."
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Donald A. Norman |
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d4873b0
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A device is easy to use when the set of possible actions is visible, when the controls and displays exploit natural mappings.
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Donald A. Norman |
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5534d4e
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Skeuomorphic is the technical term for incorporating old, familiar ideas into new technologies, even though they no longer play a functional role. Skeuomorphic designs are often comfortable for traditionalists, and indeed the history of technology shows that new technologies and materials often slavishly imitate the old for no apparent reason except that is what people know how to do. Early
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Donald A. Norman |
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5b3c694
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The meanings of today may not be the meanings of the future.
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Donald A. Norman |
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1c3966e
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Engineers and designers simultaneously know too much and too little. They know too much about the technology and too little about how other people live their live and do their activities.
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Donald A. Norman |
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00a8b96
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We are creative and imaginative, not mechanical and precise. Machines require precision and accuracy; people don't. And we are particularly bad at providing precise and accurate inputs. So
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Donald A. Norman |
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0c81abc
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How
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Donald A. Norman |
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d590286
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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.
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Donald A. Norman |
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465ff3c
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Some things can only be solved by massive cultural changes, which probably means they will never be solved.
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Donald A. Norman |