Table of Contents
Preface to the Revised Edition xi
1 The Psychopathology of Everyday Things 1
The Complexity of Modern Devices 4
Human-Centered Design 8
Fundamental Principles of Interaction 10
The System Image 31
The Paradox of Technology 32
The Design Challenge 34
2 The Psychology of Everyday Actions 37
How People Do Things: The Gulfs of Execution and Evaluation 38
The Seven Stages of Action 40
Human Thought: Mostly Subconscious 44
Human Cognition and Emotion 49
The Seven Stages of Action and the Three Levels of Processing 55
People as Storytellers 56
Blaming the Wrong Things 59
Falsely Blaming Yourself 65
The Seven Stages of Action: Seven Fundamental Design Principles 71
3 Knowledge in the Head and in the World 74
Precise Behavior from Imprecise Knowledge 75
Memory Is Knowledge in the Head 86
The Structure of Memory 91
Approximate Models: Memory in the Real World 100
Knowledge in the Head 105
The Tradeoff Between Knowledge in the World and in the Head 109
Memory in Multiple Heads, Multiple Devices 111
Natural Mapping 113
Culture and Design: Natural Mappings Can Vary with Culture 118
4 Knowing What to Do: Constraints 123
Discoverability, and Feedback Four Kinds of Constraints: Physical, Cultural, Semantic, and Logical 125
Applying Affordances, Signifiers, and Constraints to Everyday Objects 132
Constraints That Force the Desired Behavior 141
Conventions, Constraints, and Affordances 145
The Faucet: A Case History of Design 150
Using Sound as Signifiers 155
5 Human Error? No, Bad Design 162
Understanding Why There Is Error 163
Deliberate Violations 169
Two Types of Errors: Slips and Mistakes 170
The Classification of Slips 173
The Classification of Mistakes 179
Social and Institutional Pressures 186
Reporting Error 191
Detecting Error 194
Designing for Error 198
When Good Design Isn't Enough 210
Resilience Engineering 211
The Paradox of Automation 213
Design Principles for Dealing with Error 215
6 Design Thinking 217
Solving the Correct Problem 218
The Double-Diamond Model of Design 220
The Human-Centered Design Process 221
What I Just Told You? It Doesn't Really Work That Way 236
The Design Challenge 239
Complexity Is Good; It Is Confusion That Is Bad 247
Standardization and Technology 248
Deliberately Making Things Difficult 255
Design: Developing Technology for People 257
7 Design in the World of Business 258
Competitive Forces 259
New Technologies Force Change 264
How Long Does It Take to Introduce a New Product? 268
Two Forms of Innovation: Incremental and Radical 279
The Design of Everyday Things: 1988-2038 282
The Future of Books 288
The Moral Obligations of Design 291
Design Thinking and Thinking About Design 293
Acknowledgments 299
General Readings and Notes 305
References 321
Index 331
