Full Blog: Design of Everyday Things

Full Blog - Emotional Design

Chapter 1

This is yet another book from Donald Norman. In the first chapter the author explains why are attractive things and things with aesthetic beauty more efficient. He explains that looking at attractive things causes change in emotions and emotions lead us to take decisions. The author states that looking at beautiful things causes happiness and happiness leads to creative things and helps us to look at the bigger picture. On the other hand, fear and anxiety curb creativity, however, we tend to pay attention to minute details rather than the big picture when we are anxious and nervous. Thus, when the details are important, it's important to generate anxiety in people, and that is what alarms and sirens do.

The author also talks about three levels of processing - visceral layer, behavioral and reflective level. The visceral layer is preprogrammed into us. It's the automatic layer that deals with reflex actions. Behavioral layer dictates everyday behavior and the reflective level is the contemplative layer. This involves some thought process. Our actions are a result of interaction between these three layers.

Chapter 2

In this chapter, the author Donald Norman talks about three levels of emotional design:

• Visceral Level: This level deals with the attractiveness of the design, its appearance, look, touch and feel. Positive impact at this level triggers user creativity and curiosity, which is why attractive things are more effective.
• Behavioral Level: This level describes the functionality of the product. This is about the user experience with the product.
• Reflective Level:This is where memories, consciousness and highest levels of feelings reside. This level deals with the overall experience of using the product.

To explain these three levels, he does provide some examples like a video game than can be designed to look stylish and rugged for the young adult male games, should be available in feminine colors like pink in delicate looking packaging for girls, stylist and and decent looking for the kitchens as a cooking aid tool and rugged for the garage as training tool.

Chapter 3

This chapter seems to be a continuation of the second chapter. He talks about the same three levels of emotional designs that he talked in last chapter - Visceral, Behavioral and Reflective. However in this chapter, he goes into much detail.

• Visceral level is about the first impression or the initial impact of the product. The factors contributing to visceral design are - look, feel, appearance and attractiveness.
• The behavioral level is about functionality and the experience of the user in using the product. If the systems solves a problem or meets a need and is fairly easy to use, then the product does well at the behavioral level.
• The reflective level is the highest level of emotional design. It's about the memories that the user forms about the experiences of using the product.

Norman also talks about two designing approaches - design by the individual and design by committee.

Full Blog: Obedience to Authority

Full Blog - Coming of Age in Samoa

Full Blog: Opening Skinner’s Box

Book Reading #43 - Things That Make Us Smart

Reference Information
Title: Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine
Author: Donald Norman
Publisher: 1994 Basic Books

Chapter 1: A Human-Centered Technology

Summary:

The book begins by talking about problems with the new technology, how it is designed to aid convenience but often ends up confusing the users and becomes the cause of human errors. Norman suggests that the technology should be more human-centered, meaning getting information from human errors and their causes and incorporate the lessons into the technology designs.

He talks about two types of sciences:

• Hard sciences: requiring accurate measurements.
• Soft Sciences: based on observations, data collection and classification.

He also talks about two types of cognition:

• Experiential: when people react to events quickly and effortlessly - reflex actions.
• Reflective: when people think and make a decision before reacting.

Discussion:

Norman makes an excellent point when he says that the designs should be human centered rather than machine centered. It's indeed very important to understand human psychology and why human make mistakes to come up with intuitive designs and interfaces. Humans make mistakes and they are nowhere close to being ideal, knowing this fact can lead to intelligent designs.

Chapter 2: Experiencing the World

Summary:

In this chapter, he further discusses the different levels of cognition. He also talks about how these levels are applied differently in the real world scenarios. He then talks about how information about these two cognitive behaviors can be used effectively to strike a right balance between the two and incorporating this balance in technology design, thus leading to decrease in human errors.

He talks about three types of human learning:

• Accretion: The accumulations of knowledge, information and facts.
• Tuning: Gaining expertise at a task by repeatedly performing it.
• Restructuring:Forming of the right conceptual model behind whatever is learnt. This is the hardest part of learning.

Yet another term that he defines is Optimal Flow - the state in which the mind becomes fully engrossed and involved in the learning process.

Discussion:

After reading about four Donald Norman books, his style of writing is getting pretty monotonous and repetitive. The examples and pictures do make it interesting for a while before it again becomes monotonous. I understand that Norman comes from a technical background rather than from a literature background. He seems to have plenty of brilliant ideas, but the way he puts them does get repetitive.

Book Reading #44 - Why We Make Mistakes

Chapter 4: We Wear Rose Colored Glasses

Summary

Chapter 4 talks about how we remember what we want to remember rather what really happened. The author calls this as wearing rose colored glasses. We tend to remember our victories and forget about our losses. In one of the examples he mentions students remembering their grades to be higher than what they really were and gamblers remembering their wins. He states that this hindsight bias is a cause of many human errors.

Discussion

This chapter provided some really interesting examples that prove how we remember good things about ourselves to make ourselves feel better. I think our ego is one of the major contributing factor towards such behavior. One of the advantages of this behavior is positive attitude since remembering our losses doesn't really help us much.

Chapter 5: We Can Walk and Chew Gum - but Not Much Else

Summary:

Walking and chewing gum at the same time refers to multi-tasking. In this chapter, the author talks about human ability to multi-task. He mentions that we are not designed to multi-task, the maximum we can do is to chew gum and walk at the same time. But doing more than one things at a time has shown that both the tasks are done clumsily due lack of concentration. Some of the examples he mentions are car accidents due to texting while driving and the airplane crash that occurred because the pilot got too bugged by a minor issue, losing his focus on flying the plane. He also mentions a term called intentional blindness by which he means that if we have something else going in our minds, we tend to not see somethings that are right in front of our eyes.

Discussion:

The examples provided in this chapter prove that we should indulge ourselves in multiple simultaneous activities, especially when one of them can potentially harm us if not done well. This chapter explains us why texting or talking on phone while driving, using the car entertainment system or entering the location in the navigation system while driving can be extremely risky. An important lesson for the designers is to design a features that disallows the usage of such devices when it detects that the car is running so that the driver is forced to stop in order to use the devices.