Book Reading #5: Design of Everyday Things

Reference Information
Title: Design of Everyday Things
Author: Donald Norman
Editor: Basic Books, 2002

Chapter 2: The Psychology of Everyday Actions
Summary
This chapter discussed how people think about and use everyday things, including the trend of blaming yourself for a machine's faulty design problems that lead to errors and creating false explanations to help understand the world. He goes into depth about how people generally blame the wrong thing for an error, such as themselves or  something that is simply coincidence. He then discussed the seven stages of action (forming the goal, forming the action, specifying an action, executing the action, perceiving the state of the world, interpreting the state of the world, evaluating the outcome)  and related this to properly designing machines.


Discussion
I find the analysis of human actions to be an interesting approach to design, even though it makes perfect sense. If a machine is designed to be used naturally, by fitting into a person's seven stages of action, then it should be fairly error-free, which is essentially the goal. Also, I hadn't noticed quite how often people tend to blame themselves for errors when it's often just a design problem. People that see this happen generally just assume the person was stupid, and have tried to adapt themselves to using the machine instead of realizing that something may be wrong.