The Design of Future Things
Donald A. Norman
Basic Books, New York, 2009
Summary
Chapter 6 of The Design of Future Things emphasizes the need for effective communication between humans and their machines. The original mechanical devices that are now being replaced were fairly obvious in their working, so the operators could easily see how it accomplished its task. In addition, the physical nature of these machines gave a natural form of feedback in the sound that they make during operation, even providing information about which stage of the operation is currently being undertaken. An example of this would be the dish washer, which provides natural sound while it is in operation and the user can easily identify when the process is complete. Modern electronic devices lack these advantages, instead feedback must be explicitly devised by the designers.
The author writes that the three keys to working with intelligent systems are communication, explanation, and understanding. People can communicate with each other and animals by observing, often subconsciously, their body language. To help bridge this gap, machines should provide constant feedback to the user, even if it is working correctly. That does not mean that the machines should be blaring status updates at the user, instead it should be a subtle form of communication. Quiet is good in this case, but silence may not be. The current implementation with lights and beeps are completely artificial, therefore they are much less effective at communicating than natural means. The user must consult the manual to figure out what a particular pattern of beeps means. Feedback is useless unless it can precisely and clearly convey the message that is intended, and is important for reassurance, progress reports, learning, special circumstances, confirmation, and governing expectations.
To illustrate the communication problem further, the author gave an example from his time working at Apple. The Apple Newton was an innovative tablet that attempted to take user input in the form of writing and translate it into digital form. It did this through a complicated mathematical system that looked at whole words as a single unit. It would often give quite inexplicable results where the output was in no way related to the input from the user's point of view because the user did not understand how the device worked and blamed the device for its shortcomings. A newer system that was released looked at letters individually, so when something was mis-translated the user could easily see that the letter they wrote was not formed properly, and therefore blamed themselves instead of the device.
Finally, the author gives his opinion on the best ways to communicate between man and machine. He says that implicit communication, natural sounds, and sensible signals are critical. Calm technology exemplifies this line of thinking because it attempts to engage both the center and the periphery of the user's attention, and can switch between them as the situation requires. Natural mapping is some form of feedback that should be there naturally but sometimes is engineered out (for comfort or convenience) and causes problems since it is critical for successful operation. The author leaves us with these design principles: provide rich, complex, and natural signals, be predictable, provide a good conceptual model, make the output understandable, provide continual awareness without annoyance, and to exploit natural mappings to make interaction understandable and effective.
Opinion
The chapter appears to be a rehash of earlier material from the book. The most interesting topic discussed was the failure of the Apple Newton. The author illustrated well how the user's inability to understand how the product worked led them to believe that it was a poor product (which it may have been) since it gave such strange results that seemingly had no relation to the input.
An Apple Newton
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