This chapter addressed the psychological considerations addressed by good design. People instinctively explain their surroundings, with or without adequate knowledge to do so. This results in misconceptions and misattributions of causality. The author illustrates these concepts using examples such as an A/C thermostat and a colleague's computer problems. Many people think of a thermostat as a valve or a timer, and that turning the temperature up higher or lower than intended can speed up the heating/cooling process. This is a misconception - a false mental model. The colleague's computer troubles resulted from a misattribution of causality. He thought that a program was causing his terminal to fail, when the real culprit was a hardware problem. When problems such as these occur, people are apt to blame themselves and become frustrated.
The chapter goes on to discussing the stages of action: perception, interpretation, evaluation, goals, intention to act, sequence of actions, execution of sequence. These stages form an approximate model and a continual feedback loop into the world. The loop can be started at any point, and people don't always behave logically with well-formed goals. These stages serve to aid design by re-emphasizing the principles of good design: visibility, good conceptual model, good mappings, and feedback.
No comments:
Post a Comment