Book Reading #5: Design of Everyday Things

Title: 
Chapter 2: The Psychology of Everyday Actions

Reference: 
Norman, Donald. The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic, 2002.

Summary:
This chapter discussed ways in which users of things attribute blame.  It spoke of people falsely blaming themselves when the problem was really in the complexity of the devise being used.  The focus of this was on ordinary and seemingly easy appliances and how people see themselves as inefficient when they cannot work something that should be simple.  Concerning blame, it showed how we blame the environment for our own situations and blame others for their own actions and states.

They chapter touched on our perspectives and how we often perceive things in a completely different way the reality and this is often due because of our sense of causality and insufficient information of the process at hand.

Norman laid out 7 stages of action that do not necessarily start in the same place and not always are all of them used, but they are involved in most processes: perceiving, interpreting, evaluating, goals, intentions, sequence of actions, and execution.  All these revolve around our surroundings.

Finally it ended with his gulf of execution and gulf of evaluation.  The gulf of execution dealt with the idea that it should be easy to put our intentions to action.  The gulf of evaluation is the conception of the device and how to use it.

Discussion:
This chapter was very thought provoking, yet tied back into the idea presented in chapter 1 about visibility, conceptual layout, good mappings, and feedback.  I think it is great how he built on the ideas of chapter 1 in a different way, this time using our psychological impulses to explain the need for these four attributes.  It is interesting to see the development of different technologies and how in some ways the technology has aided in ease of use such as the fact that we no longer have to worry about threading film through the projector but simply pop in a solid form of media and it does everything for us, yet sometimes it is difficult to actually access that media.