The Design of Everyday Things

No matter how brilliant the product, if people cannot use it, it will receive poor reviews.

the poor design that gives rise to so many of the problems of modern life, especially of modern technology

e must design our machines on the assumption that people will make errors

Why are people having problems?” they wonder. “You are being too logical,” I say. “You are designing for people the way you would like them to be, not for the way they really are.”

Engineers are trained to think logically. As a result, they come to believe that all people must think this way

Natural mappings are those where the relationship between the controls and the object to be controlled (the burners, in this case) is obvious.

It has long been known that rehearsal of material—mentally reviewing it while still active in working memory (STM)—is an important component of the formation of long-term memory traces

Note that we do not remember our experiences as an exact recording; rather, as bits and pieces that are reconstructed and interpreted each time we recover the memories, which means they are subject to all the distortions and changes that the human explanatory mechanism imposes upon life.

Psychologists distinguish between two major classes of memory: short-term or working memory, and long-term memory. The two are quite different, with different implications for design.

Short-term or working memory (STM) retains the most recent experiences or material that is currently being thought about. It is the memory of the just present. Information is retained automatically and retrieved without effort; but the amount of information that can be retained this way is severely limited