Essays

Design
Gratuitous Graphics and Human-Centered Website Design
Human-centered web sites: where you can actually find what you are looking for, and where you don't wait eons for meaningless graphics to load. Where the organizational structure of the site matches the way the viewers think. Is this such a strange concept; putting users first? More...

Applying the Behavioral, Cognitive, and Social Sciences to Products
To do design requires an approximate science, a way of doing quick but effective computations: guidelines useful for synthesis and design. The field of BCSS applications is different from that of BCSS science. This does not mean low-quality work, it means different work, with different skills and different goals. More...

Banner Blindness, Human Cognition and Web Design
Benway and Lane have studied "Banner Blindness" -- the fact that people tend to ignore those big, flashy, colorful banners at the top of web pages. This is pretty interesting stuff, for the entire reason they are so big and obnoxious is to attract attention, yet they fail. Evidently nobody ever studied real users before -- they simply assumed that big, colorful items were visible. This paper, shows once again the importance of observations over logic when it comes to predicting human behavior. More...

Usability is not a Luxury
If the customer can't find it, then the customer can't buy it. This simple statement explains why usability is the lifeline of e-commerce. More...

The Post Disciplinary Revolution: Industrial Design and Human Factors--Heal Yourselves
Outline of an invited keynote address at the 1998 annual meeting of the Human Factors society. They hated it. More...

Affordances and Design (Part 1)
In the world of design, the term "affordance" has taken on a life far beyond the original meaning. It might help if we return to the original definition. Let me try to clarify the definition of the term and its many uses. More...

Affordance, Conventions and Design (Part 2)
The Psychology of Everyday Things (POET) was about "perceived affordance." If I ever were to revise POET, I would make a global change, replacing all instances of the word "affordance" with the phrase "perceived affordance." The designer cares more about what actions the user perceives to be possible than what is true. Moreover, affordances, both real and perceived, play very different roles in physical products than they do in the world of screen-based products. In the latter case, affordances play a relatively minor role: cultural conventions are much more important. More...

Design as Practiced
Design as practiced is considerably different from design as idealized in academic discussions of "good design." Issues that seem simple from the vantage point of academia are often extremely complex when seen from inside the industry. Indeed, the two sides seem hardly to be speaking the same language. In the course of my experiences, I have come to recognize that industry faces numerous problems that are outside of the scope of the traditional analyses of design. More...

Human Error and the Design of Computer Systems
Many advances have been made in our understanding of the hardware and software of information processing systems, but one major gap remains: the inclusion of the human operator into the system analysis. The behavior of an information processing system is not a product of the design specifications: it is a product of the interaction between the human and the system. More...

Emotion & Design

Emotion & Design: Attractive things work better (html version).
PDF version (prettier--this is the actual publication).
June 2002. (Also published as Norman, D. A. (2002). Emotion and design: Attractive things work better. Interactions Magazine, ix (4), 36-42). Advances in our understanding of emotion and affect have implications for the science of design. Affect changes the operating parameters of cognition: positive affect enhances creative, breadth-first thinking whereas negative affect focuses cognition, enhancing depth-first processing and minimizing distractions. Therefore, it is essential that products designed for use under stress follow good human-centered design, for stress makes people less able to cope with difficulties and less flexible in their approach to problem solving. Positive affect makes people more tolerant of minor difficulties and more flexible and creative in finding solutions. Products designed for more relaxed, pleasant occasions can enhance their usability through pleasant, aesthetic design. Aesthetics matter: attractive things work better.

* Norman, D. A., Ortony, A., & Russell, D. M. Affect and machine design: Lessons for the development of autonomous machines.
In press, IBM Systems Journal. (Scheduled for publication in 2003, 42, 1.) Originally presented at the IBM Autonomic Computing Summit at T J Watson Research Center, May 14-15, 2002

*NOTE: The IBM Systems Journal prohibits internet access to papers prior to publication. Therefore, the paper itself is not available on this website. Manuscript copies (a Word file) are available by email request to jnd@jnd.org

August 2002. Human beings have evolved a rich and sophisticated set of processes for engaging with the world in which cognition and affect play two different but equal roles. Both cognition and affect can be thought of as systems for information processing. One, that of cognition, interprets and makes sense of the world. The other, affect, evaluates and judges. The affective system modulates the operating parameters of cognition and provides warning of possible dangers, thus enhances survivability and reliability. The study of how these two systems work together provides guidance for the design of complex autonomous systems that must deal with a variety tasks in a dynamic and often unpredictable environment.

Technology & Society
The Life Cycle of a Technology: Why it is so difficult for large companies to innovate
As I wrote "The Invisible Computer," I was struck by a paradox. On the one hand, there is very substantial agreement that ease of use and understandability are important. Similarly, good industrial design, simple, short documentation, and convenient, pleasing products are superior. I wondered why, if ease of use and understandability seems to important, On the other hand, much of the computer technology today violates all these things, yet the companies prosper. . . . So why is it that good products can fail and inferior products can succeed? More...

Cyborgs of the New Millennium
To date, the way we interact with computers is incredibly unimaginative and limited. Basically, we sit in front of the box looking and listening, pointing and typing, and occasionally talking. Will this change? Of course, but I believe the change will come about primarily by changes in the computer itself, getting rid of the boxes and embedding them into devices and appliances. More...

Looking Forward to the 21st Century
It is time for technology to be quieter, calmer, and less visible. Let us make the 21st century be the time to hide the technology, to let it all become invisible. Just as the sewers and water pipes of the homes are invisible, yet still essential; or just as the electric wiring and electric motors throughout the home or office are ever present but beneath conscious awareness, let the computer technology become an enabling infrastructure: invisible, out of sight, out of mind, but ever more powerful. More...

Making Technology Invisible: A Conversation with Don Norman
My book "The Invisible Computer" explains the "why" of Information appliances – Eric Bergman's book, "Information Appliances and Beyond", explains the "how." This is Chapter One from the book. More... (this link takes you to the Morgan Kaufmann Publishers site)

Education
The Future of Education: Lessons Learned from Video Games and Museum Exhibits
We will solve the fundamental problems only through social policy, through organizational change, and through deep understanding of organizations and the people who comprise and are served by them. We need to change the way we think about education, and through that understanding, change the way we do it. More...

Learning from the Success of Computer Games
We learn not by having our heads filled with the great thoughts and ideas of others, but by constructing them within our own conceptual structures. But this construction works best when the scenario is rigged so as to lead us to the ideas, to force us to confront them and understand them. This is what the successful game designer does. This is what the successful educator must do. More...

In Defense of Cheating
No, I am not in favor of deception, trickery, fraud, or swindle. What I wish to change are the curriculum and examination practices of our school systems that insist on unaided work, arbitrary learning of irrelevant and uninteresting facts. I'd like to move them toward an emphasis on understanding, on knowing how to get to an answer rather than knowing the answer, and on cooperation rather than isolation. Cheating that involves deceit is, of course wrong, but we should examine the school practices that lead to cheating: change the practices, and the deceit will naturally diminish. More...

Technology and the Rise of the For-profit University
The traditional university is all things to all people, but it is primarily a place for professors to learn, to study, and yes, to teach. The teaching follows the traditional model of pouring knowledge into the heads of obedient students. This is a teacher-centered model of education, one that has repeatedly been shown to be inferior. More...

Television
Advanced TV Standards: Into the Future with Jaunty Air and an Anchor Around our Necks
We are in the midst of an interesting revolution, one that I am sure historians 200 years from now will call one of the more profound technological changes in written history. This revolution is really about social interaction, collaboration, and access to knowledge. It isn't about telephones or computers or television. More...

The Perils of Home Theater
(Also published in IEEE's Computer magazine, June 2002). Anyone who thinks that the computer industry has made things difficult for customers, wait till you look at home theater. There is a major opportunity here to enlarge the market considerably by setting, agreeing upon, and implementing industry-wide standards for interconnection, aimed at making the result easier to install and use, far more comprehensible, and therefore more attractive to the average family. More...

DVD Menu Design: The Failures of Web Design Recreated Yet Again
It is time to take DVD design as seriously as we do web design. The field needs some discipline: Some attention to the User Experience, concern about accessibility for those with less than perfect sight and hearing, and some standardization of control and display formats. More...

People
Being Analog
Chapter 7 from The Invisible Computer © 1998 — We are analog beings trapped in a digital world, and the worst part is, we did it to ourselves. More...

How Might People Interact with Agents
From Software Agents, J. Bradshaw, Ed. © 1997 — Probably all the major software manufacturers are exploring the use of intelligent agents. Myths, promises, and reality are all colliding. But the main difficulties I foresee are social, not technical: How will intelligent agents interact with people and perhaps more important, how might people think about agents? More...

How Might Humans Interact with Robots?
In developing an understanding of how humans interact with robots, we can draw our lessons from several disciplines:
1. Human-Computer Interaction
2. Automation in such areas as Aviation
3. Science fiction, e.g., Asimov's 4 laws of Robots
4. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
5. Human Consciousness, Emotion and Personality
All of these areas are valuable, but each stresses a different aspect of interaction so, in the end, we must draw lessons from all. In the case of robots, it turns out that although all these teach valuable lessons, they aren't enough: we still need more. More...

Toilet Paper Algorithms: I didn't know you had to be a computer scientist to use toilet paper.
April 2002: modified in June and August, 2002. — When we remodeled our house, we put in dual-paper toilet roll holders so that we would always have a new roll when the old one ran out. Oops, they both ran out together. We discovered the algorithms of toilet paper use. More...