The Design of Future Things: Chapter 6

Feel that rattle? I don't think
it's supposed to feel like that...

The Design of Future Things, Donald A. Norman

Hip-hip-hurrah, hip-hip-hurray, my oh my what a wonderful THANK YE FLUFFY GODS THAT IT'S FINALLY OVER.

Also Dann, los geht's!

Summary:

Todays reading looks at communication between human and device, looking more at feedback from machine to man. At the core, he states that good machine communication means "seen but not heard", if I don't want to talk to my machine, I should know its alive, not dieing, and I shouldn't need to stare at it and open a dialog to determine these things. He restates for the fifth or sixth time that many devices are designed with non-natural indicators, and that when an error occurs, it's generally the poor hapless device that is blamed. He then details a few interesting occurrences within the field of handwriting recognition where-in people actually learned to blame themselves (and hopefully modify their behavior), rather then the technology, because they had a sense of "okay, this is why the machine isn't understanding me". He talks about natural mappings and cars. Which I won't go into again. Then he summarizes with the six rules that you should have learned from the previous 2000 lines or so worth of reading:

1. Provide rich, complex, natural signals
2. Be predictable
3. Provide a half decent conceptual model
4. Make the output understandable
5. Provide continual awareness, without annoyance
6. Exploit natural mappings to make interaction understandable and effective.

That is the book, summarized into 6 sentence fragments. I would have much preferred this with 10-20 pages of meaningful expansion. But that's me, and I'm not the professor.

Discussion:

1. Why is this paper interesting or significant?

It's the last one! It also gives a concrete example of where erroneous output leads to an implicit modification of user behavior- because that systems errors are based more closely on a drawing space then statistical inference, the user can see "Hmm, my g's look like m's, I should fix that". Which is an intriguing case study.

2. What are the faults of this work?

Early on Norman discusses lights as an arbitrary indicator of whether or not a machine is working, citing the fundamental disconnect between light and machine state (requiring a manual to determine meaning), as opposed to naturally generated sounds coming from mechanical machines. The problem with this is, when you're first exposed to a device, you have no earthly idea what any of the sounds mean either. You can say "ohh, hey, it's doing something noisy now, that means its working", but when first introduced to a device, you learn what the sounds mean. You do the same thing when introduced to a device with light feedback, "I plug it in, ohh, hey, a red LED, that must be some sort of power or charging light; I press a button and a light comes on and, after a minute shuts off. But Look! My ramen noodles are now edible. That light must indicate the magicy machine is making things edible". You learn what the indicators mean by interacting with the device, same as you always would.

He says at one point "People need to be kept in the loop" but never really specifies why. If a machine breaks that the person is responsible for, why yes, that person needs to be in the loop. If that machine is expensive and its breaking could cost lives, then yes, really, that persons need to understand it inside and out. If it's a coffee machine, or an upload, all I really want to know is "is it done", and maybe "is it even working", and that's the extent of how far I want to be in the loop. Which is to say, there are locales of where these things are and are not important.

Basically, at the core he ignores "different situations call for different thinking", and part of this stems from the fact that he never specifies a domain for his advice- clearly it's all coming from his need for smarter cars, but when it's applied to coffee makers, web sites, and factory control systems, the advice falls a bit flat.

3. What is the possible future work extending from this work?

Implementing the driver-less highway system. If for no other reason then to get rid of people driving cars, and thus implicitly, this book. 

(Sorry Don, but it's too wordy and repetitious for me)