Book Reading #14: Design of Everyday Things

Title:
Chapter 5: To Err is Human

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

Summary:
The author explained how people make errors very often.  They can be classified into slips and mistakes. 

1. Slips - a misplaced action
1. Types of Slips
1.  Capture Error - A frequently done activity "captures" or lays over the activity at hand
2. Description Error - Know you are suppose to do something to a particular object but instead do that something on an object similar to the particular.
3. Data-Driven Error - Mistaking a number with another well-known number
4. Associative Activation - Doing an intended action in the medium of a different way that supposed to.
5. Loss-of-Activation Error - Go to do something but then forget what you were suppose to do.
6. Mode Error - Too many modes in a system makes you accidentally choose the wrong one.
2. It is difficult to detect slips because it usually seems as though we did the correct action.
2. Mistakes - a wrong goal set
1. Described theories of how memory is made up
2. Reviewed short term and long term memory

We often make errors but they should be thought of when designing products and reduce even the possibility to err.  A forcing function makes mistakes not able to happen because one thing requires another and if you do not do the first you cannot do the second.

Discussion:
I think classifying slips into subcategories is completely pointless and I did not get anything out of that.  Talking about how the memory is made up was ridiculous as well.  What was interesting was the idea to allow us not to make mistakes by designing things in such a way (through forcing functions) that we cannot make mistakes, or if we do we will only make one before we must go back and try again.