Number of words – 252 When people have trouble using technology, especially when they perceive (usually incorrectly) that nobody else is having the same problems, they tend to blame themselves. Worse, the more they have trouble, the more helpless they may feel, beliving that they must be technically or mechanically inept. This is just the … Read more

Number of words – 395 People try to find causes for events. They tend to assign a causal relation whenever two things occur in succession. If some unexpected event happens in my home just after I have taken some action, I am apt to conclude that it was caused by that action, even if there … Read more

Number of words – 284 One important emotional state is the one that accompanies complete immersion into an activity, a state that the social scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has labeled “flow.” Csikszentmihalyi has long studied how people interact with their work and play, and how their lives reflect this intermix of activities. When in the flow … Read more

Number of words – 179 In psychology, there has been a long debate about which happens first: emotion or cognition. Do we run and flee because some event happened that made us afraid? Or are we afraid because our conscious, reflective mind notices that we are running? The three-level analysis shows that both of these … Read more

Number of words – 731 Because we are only aware of the reflective level of conscious processing, we tend to believe that all human thought is conscious. But it isn’t. We also tend to believe that thought can be separated from emotion. This is also false. Cognition and emotion cannot be separated. Cognitive thoughts lead … Read more

Number of words – 435 For many everyday tasks, goals and intentions are not well specified: they are opportunistic rather than planned. Opportunistic actions are those in which the behavior takes advantage of circumstances. Rather than engage in extensive planning and analysis, we go about the day’s activities and do things as opportunities arise. Thus, … Read more

Number of words – 559 Design requires the cooperative efforts of multiple disciplines. The number of different disciplines required to produce a successful product is staggering. Great design requires great designers, but that isn’t enough: it also requires great management, because the hardest part of producing a product is coordinating all the many, separate disciplines, … Read more

Number of words – 411 Mapping is an important concept in the design and layout of controls and displays. When the mapping uses spatial correspondence between the layout of the controls and the devices being controlled, it is easy to determine how to use them. In steering a car, we rotate the steering wheel clockwise … Read more

Number of words – 112 My favorite example of a misleading signifier is a row of vertical pipes across a service road that I once saw in a public park. The pipes obviously blocked cars and trucks from driving on that road: they were good examples of anti-affordances. But to my great surprise, I saw … Read more

Number of words – 208 Signifiers can be deliberate and intentional, such as the sign push on a door, but they may also be accidental and unintentional, such as our use of the visible trail made by previous people walking through a field or over a snow-covered terrain to determine the best path. Or how … Read more