Highlights first synced by [[readwise]] [[September 2nd, 2020]]

• The device must explain itself. (Location 167)
  • Note: The device must explain itself.
• I asked him to explain. “You mean,” I said, “that it takes five or six tries to get an idea right?” “Yes,” he said, “at least that.” “But,” I replied, “you also said (Location 890)
• that if a newly introduced product doesn’t catch on in the first two or three times, then it is dead?” “Yup,” he said. “Then new products are almost guaranteed to fail, no matter how good the idea.” “Now you understand,” said the designer. (Location 894)
• It is as if they take perverse pride in thinking of themselves as mechanically incompetent. (Location 985)
• If an error is possible, someone will make it. (Location 1011)
• It’s a pity the film companies are so far behind. Well, in a while it won’t matter. There won’t be any film, just videotape. (Location 1331)
  • Note: -The Design of Everyday Things, LOL
• Why the apparent discrepancy between the precision of behavior and the imprecision of knowledge? Because not all of the knowledge required for precise behavior has to be in the head. It can be distributed—partly in the head, partly in the world, and partly in the constraints of the world. (Location 1393)
• How can design signal the appropriate actions? (Location 1948)
• One important set of signals comes through the natural constraints of objects, physical constraints that limit what can be done. (Location 1949)
• Another set of signals comes from the affordances of objects, which convey messages about their possible uses, actions, and functions. (Location 1950)
• The thirteen parts are so cleverly constructed that even an adult can put them together. (Location 1969)
• 1. Visibility. Make relevant parts visible. 2. Feedback. Give each action an immediate and obvious effect. (Location 2236)
• If the cooking information were on the package in machine-readable form, one could put the food in the microwave oven, pass a scanner over the printed information, and let the oven program itself. (Location 2308)
• We can place slips into one of six categories: capture errors, description errors, data-driven errors, associative activation errors, loss-of-activation errors, and mode errors. (Location 2420)
• capture error, in which a frequently done activity suddenly takes charge instead of (captures) the one intended. (Location 2426)
• In the common slip known as the description error, the intended action has much in common with others that are possible. As a result, unless the action sequence is completely and precisely specified, the intended action might fit several possibilities. (Location 2439)
• Much human behavior is automatic, for example, brushing away an insect. Automatic actions are data driven—triggered by the arrival of the sensory data. But sometimes data-driven activities can intrude into an ongoing action sequence, causing behavior that was not intended. (Location 2469)
• Associative activation errors are the slips studied by Freud; you think something that ought not to be said and then, to your embarrassment, you say it. (Location 2478)
• Lack-of-activation errors occur because the presumed mechanism—the “activation” of the goals—has decayed. The less technical but more common term would be “forgetting.” (Location 2488)
• Mode errors occur when devices have different modes of operation, and the action appropriate for one mode has different meanings in other modes. (Location 2497)
• Mode errors are common with digital watches and computer systems (especially text editors). (Location 2502)
• Mistakes result from the choice of inappropriate goals. (Location 2603)
• Even though principles of rationality seem as often violated as followed, we still cling to the notion that human thought should be rational, logical, and orderly. Much of law is based upon the concept of rational thought and behavior. Much of economic theory is based upon the model of the rational human who attempts to optimize personal benefit, utility, or comfort. Many scientists who study artificial intelligence use the mathematics of formal logic—the predicate calculus—as their major tool to simulate thought. (Location 2610)
• But human thought—and its close relatives, problem solving and planning—seem more rooted in past experience than in logical deduction. Mental life is not neat and orderly. It does not proceed smoothly and gracefully in neat, logical form. Instead, it hops, skips, and jumps its way from idea to idea, tying together things that have no business being put together; forming new creative leaps, new insights and concepts. Human thought is not like logic; it is fundamentally different in kind and in spirit. The difference is neither worse nor better. But it is the difference that leads to creative discovery and to great robustness of behavior. (Location 2614)
• Much of our knowledge is hidden beneath the surface of our minds, inaccessible to conscious inspection. We discover our own knowledge primarily through our actions. (Location 2672)
• So it is with human memory. We mush together details of things that are similar, and give undue weight to the discrepant. We relish discrepant and unusual memories. We remember them, talk about them, and bias behavior toward them in wholly inappropriate ways. (Location 2697)
• This event-based reasoning is powerful, yet fundamentally flawed. Because thought is based on what can be recalled, the rare event can predominate. (Location 2701)
• Subconscious thought matches patterns. It operates, I believe, by finding the best possible match of one’s past experience to the current one. It proceeds rapidly and automatically, without effort. Subconscious processing is one of our strengths. It is good at detecting general trends, at recognizing the relationship between what we now experience and what has happened in the past. And it is good at generalizing, at making predictions about the general trend based on few examples. But subconscious thought can find matches that are inappropriate, or wrong, and it may not distinguish the common from the rare. Subconscious thought is biased toward regularity and structure, and it is limited in formal power. It may not be capable of symbolic manipulation, of careful reasoning through a sequence of steps. (Location 2844)
• Conscious thought tends to be slow and serial. Conscious processing seems to involve short-term memory and is thereby limited in the amount that can be readily available. (Location 2856)
• Conscious thought is severely limited by the small capacity of short-term memory. Five or six items is all that can be kept available at any one moment. But subconscious thought is one of the tools of the conscious mind, and the memory limitation can be overcome if only an appropriate organizational structure can be found. (Location 2882)
• Put the required knowledge in the world. Don’t require all the knowledge to be in the head. Yet do allow for more efficient operation when the user has learned the operations, has gotten the knowledge in the head. • Use the power of natural and artificial constraints: physical, logical, semantic, and cultural. Use forcing functions and natural mappings. • Narrow the gulfs of execution and evaluation. Make things visible, both for execution and evaluation. On the execution side, make the options readily available. On the evaluation side, make the results of each action apparent. Make it possible to determine the system state readily, easily, and accurately, and in a form consistent with the person’s goals, intentions, and expectations. (Location 3143)
• One negative force is the demands of time: new models are already into their design process before the old ones have even been released to customers. Moreover, mechanisms for collecting and feeding back the experiences of customers seldom exist. Another force is the pressure to be distinctive, to stand out, to make each design look different from what has gone before. It is the rare organization that is content to let a good product stand or to let natural evolution perfect it slowly. No, each year a “new, improved” model must come out, usually incorporating new features that do not use the old as a starting point. In far too many instances, the results spell disaster for the consumer. (Location 3185)
• There is yet another problem: the curse of individuality. (Location 3191)
• 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. (Location 3194)
• All the folklore of design has been lost with the brash new engineers who can’t wait to add yet the latest electronic gimmickry to the telephone, whether needed or not. (Location 3210)
  • Note: Smart phones and apps!
• Someday key labeling will be done by electronic displays on each key, so changing the labels will also become trivial. So computer technology may liberate users from forced standardization. Everyone could select the keyboard of personal choice. (Location 3337)
  • Note: or an entirely digtal keyboard...
• Designers go astray for several reasons. First, the reward structure of the design community tends to put aesthetics first. (Location 3348)
• “It probably won a prize” is a disparaging phrase in this book. (Location 3354)
• Let me be positive for a change: there are science museums and exhibits that work well. The science museums in Boston and in Toronto, the Monterey Aquarium, the Exploratorium in San Francisco. (Location 3421)
  • Note: places to visit (if they havent changed much)
• “People, generally engineers or managers, tend to feel that they are humans, therefore they can design something for other humans just as well as the trained interface expert. It’s really interesting to watch engineers and computer scientists go about designing a product. They argue and argue about how to do things, generally with a sincere desire to do the right thing for the user. But when it comes to assessing the tradeoffs between the user interface and internal resources in a product, they almost always tend to simplify their own lives. They will have to do the work, they try to make the internal machine architecture as simple as possible. Internal design elegance sometimes maps to user interface elegance, but not always. Design teams really need vocal advocates for the people who will ultimately use the interface.” (Location 3460)
• In my university, copying machines are purchased by the Printing and Duplicating Center, then dispersed to the various departments. The copiers are purchased after a formal “request for proposals” has gone out to manufacturers and dealers of machines. The selection is almost always based solely on price, plus a consideration of the cost of maintenance. Usability? Not considered. The state of California requires by law that universities purchase things on a price basis; there are no legal requirements regarding understandability or usability of the product. That is one reason we get unusable copying machines and telephone systems. (Location 3483)
• “Design is the successive application of constraints until only a unique product is left.” (Location 3505)
• The solution has got to be either increased public transportation, or supplied drivers, or perhaps special streets or highway lanes with slower speed limits. Automated cars, the dream of science fiction writers and city planners, may still one day come about; they would take care of this problem. (Location 3587)
• At least my computer allows flexibility in type size; most do not. (Location 3600)
  • Note: Heh. Oh, the 80s...
• when simple things need instructions, it is a certain sign of poor design. (Location 3661)
• Each problem alone isn’t a big deal. But the total sum of all the trivial mal-design unnecessarily adds to the trauma of everyday life. (Location 3709)
  • Note: ego depletion
• Design should: • Make it easy to determine what actions are possible at any moment (make use of constraints). • Make things visible, including the conceptual model of the system, the alternative actions, and the results of actions. • Make it easy to evaluate the current state of the system. • Follow natural mappings between intentions and the required actions; between actions and the resulting effect; and between the information that is visible and the interpretation of the system state. (Location 4051)
• 1. Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head. 2. Simplify the structure of tasks. 3. Make things visible: bridge the gulfs of Execution and Evaluation. 4. Get the mappings right. 5. Exploit the power of constraints, both natural and artificial. 6. Design for error. 7. When all else fails, standardize. (Location 4071)
• Keep the task much the same, but provide mental aids. • Use technology to make visible what would otherwise be invisible, thus improving feedback and the ability to keep control. • Automate, but keep the task much the same. • Change the nature of the task. (Location 4138)
• 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. (Location 4166)
• In general, I welcome any technological advance that reduces my need for mental work but still gives me the control and enjoyment of the task. That way I can exert my mental efforts on the core of the task, the thing to be remembered, the purpose of the arithmetic or the music. I want to use my mental powers for the important things, not fritter them away on the mechanics. (Location 4181)
• Automation has its virtues, but automation is dangerous when it takes too much control from the user. (Location 4249)
• MAKE THINGS VISIBLE: BRIDGE THE GULFS OF EXECUTION AND EVALUATION (Location 4264)
• GET THE MAPPINGS RIGHT (Location 4288)
• EXPLOIT THE POWER OF CONSTRAINTS, BOTH NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL (Location 4309)
• DESIGN FOR ERROR (Location 4315)
• WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS, STANDARDIZE (Location 4321)
• Would you consider changing how we specify time? The current system is arbitrary. The day is divided into twenty-four rather arbitrary units—hours. But we tell time in units of twelve, not twenty-four, so there have to be two cycles of twelve hours each, plus the special convention of A.M. and P.M. so we know which cycle we are talking about. Then we divide each hour into sixty minutes and each minute into sixty seconds. What if we switched to metric divisions: seconds divided into tenths, milliseconds, and microseconds? We would have days, millidays, and microdays. There would have to be a new hour, minute, and second: call them thenewhour, the newminute, and the newsecond. It would be easy: ten newborns to the day, one hundred newminutes to the newborn, one hundred newseconds to the newminute. Each newborn would last exactly 2.4 times an old hour: 144 old minutes. So the old one-hour period of the schoolroom or television program would be replaced with a half-newborn period—only 20 percent longer than the old. Each newminute would be quite similar to the current minute: 0.7 of an old minute, to be exact (each newminute would be about 42 old seconds). And each newsecond would be slightly shorter than an old second. The differences in durations could be gotten used to; they aren’t that large. And computations would be so much easier. I can hear the everyday conversations now: “I’ll meet you at noon—5 newhours. Don’t be late, it’s only a half hour from now, 50 newminutes, OK?” “What time is it? 7.85—15 minutes to the evening news.” What do I think of it? I wouldn’t go near it. (Location 4374)
• In earlier times, when goose quill and ink were used on parchment, it was tedious and difficult to correct what had been written. Writers had to be careful. Sentences had to be thought through before being set to paper. One result was sentences that were long and embellished—the graceful rhetorical style we associate with our older literature. With the advent of easier to use writing tools, corrections became easier to make; so writing was done more rapidly, but also with less thought and care—more like everyday speech. Some critics decried the lack of literary niceties. Others argued that this was how people really communicated, and besides, it was easier to understand. (Location 4520)
• The next step in writing technology is already visible on the horizon: hypertext. (Location 4553)
• Imagine that this book was in hypertext. How would it work? Well, I’ve used several devices that relate to hypertext: one is the footnote,11 another is parenthetical comments, and yet another is contrasting text. (I have tended not to use parenthetical asides in this book because I fear they distract, make the sentences longer, and add to the reader’s memory burden, as this parenthetical statement demonstrates.) (Location 4566)
• Contrasting text, when used as a commentary, is a kind of hypertext. Here is a comment on the text itself, optional and not essential to a first reading. The typography gives signals to the reader. Actual hypertext will be written and read using a computer, of course, so that this commentary wouldn’t be visible unless it had been requested. (Location 4571)
• Two developments are worthy of mention, both intended to serve the ever-promised “house of the future.” One most wonderful development is the “smart house,” the place where your every want is taken care of by intelligent, omniscient appliances. The other promised development is the house of knowledge: whole libraries available at our fingertips, the world’s information resources available through our telephone/television set/home computer/rooftop satellite antenna. (Location 4591)
• Imagine all of our electric appliances connected together via an intelligent “information bus.” (Location 4597)
• Can you imagine what it would take to control these devices? How would you tell your oven when to turn on? Would you do this through the buttons available at your friendly pay telephone? Or would you lug around a portable controlling unit? In either case, the complexity boggles the mind. Do the designers of these systems have some secret cure for the problems described throughout this book or have they perhaps already mastered the lessons within? Hardly. (Location 4606)
• Whole encyclopaedias can be available at our fingertips, through our computer terminals and television screens. And when every home is connected to a central computer system through improved capacity telephone lines, or the cable television wire, or a rooftop antenna aimed at the neighborhood earth satellite, the information of the world is available to all. (Location 4623)
• the conscious manipulation of society has severe drawbacks, not the least of which is the fact that not everyone agrees on the appropriate goals. Design, therefore, takes on political significance; (Location 4643)
• In Western cultures, design has reflected the capitalistic importance of the marketplace, with an emphasis on exterior features deemed to be attractive to the purchaser. In the consumer economy taste is not the criterion in the marketing of expensive foods or drinks, usability is not the primary criterion in the marketing of home and office appliances. We are surrounded with objects of desire, not objects of use.14 (Location 4645)
• Give mental prizes to those who practice good design: send flowers. Jeer those who don’t: send weeds. (Location 4667)