Book Reading #2: Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 2 - The Psychology of Actions

This chapter was titled by the author as The Psychology of Everyday Actions. He began by talking about a situation where he had helped someone else open a drawer when she couldn't open it herself. She than began to blame herself falsely for not being able to do it herself. Donald Norman, the author, then went on to state that most people blame themselves for not being able to figure out something that they perceived to be easy. He countered that argument by stating that sometimes the product itself is usually at fault for not being able to convey itself properly and instead confuses the user. He talked about how humans think a certain way and try to find reason for the inability to perform.

The author then began to talk about society and humans themselves to try and explain why people had blamed themselves for a products poor design. He then talked about in length about seven stages of action. Perceive, Interpretation, Purpose, Intent, Action. He talked about how that is how it is a typical order people follow when something is performed. Another term I thought useful since it was on a quiz in class was Gulf of Evaluation. It's the gap between two actions that a user expects when he learns more about the device.

I thought this chapter was interesting as people do in fact find fault in themselves for their inability to surpass flaws of something else. They attribute that to themselves instead. I think that products should be better designed to help people, but there is also a limit to how much effort should be put into that. If too much is put into simplicity, it often sacrifices creativity and complexity some users desire.


Chapter 3 - Knowledge in Head and World

In this chapter, the author talked about different forms of knowledge and the processes usually used to learn about them. The title Knowledge in the Head and in the World seemed like a fitting title for it. To learn how to use a product, a user usually goes through a process of learning before he can fully understand and comprehend it. The author went on to say that there are different levels of 'knowing' information. The first is just memorization. Short term memory that usually fades away and is sometimes hard to make sense of. The next level is mapping or making sense of information based off of previous relationships or correlations. The final step of understanding information it that itself. Understanding or 'learning' information is key in truly understanding something and having it readily accessible. This stage of often harder to get through but is more of a long term process than the rest.

He also talked about constraints that help a user understand or fill in gaps when needed. If something had a physical constraint like he stated in the book, for example a LEGO set. Some pieces won't fit on other pieces and makes it easier to build when it only fits on a certain set.

I thought this chapter was interesting but not as interesting as the previous chapter. It talked about learning, but I think the more important questions were the psychology ones behind the problems. Thinking about how to learn about learning I think is slightly counter productive. I think it's best to let the mind do what it does best and instead think deeper about the problems to fix and understand them.


Chapter 4 - Knowing What to Do

This chapter was titled Knowing What To Do. In this chapter, Norman talked more about the constraints he did in the previous chapter. He went on further to talk about different kinds of constraints, logical cultural and physical constraints. Physical was talked in my previous summary and involved something physical that our mind filled in to make sense of. Cultural constraints are a bit harder to understand but involved using cultural  usuals or constraints to make sense of things. These things are learned and are a different form of constraint. The logical constraints he talked about was about using the previously learned experiences help make sense of what they were trying to do.

I liked this chapter because this was form of the learning experience he talked about in the previous chapter. It was a combination of that and actually went into a more in-depth look into understanding how people think.