Design of Future Things Ch. 6

The Design of Future Things
Chapter 6
Donald Norman
Editors:?

Summary:


Chapter 6 begins by discussing the recent changes in computer human interaction. The author believes that older machines were more obvious to understand and provided natural feedback to the user. For instance, a dishwasher provides sound feedback for when it is working and when it is done. On the other hand, more modern devices are less obvious in their workings and need to be better designed to make up for this weakness. One way that machines can provide better feedback to users is to provide constant feedback to the user, even when the machine is not malfunctioning. It is also important that this feedback be natural and easily recognizable to the user. The author describes this idea by giving an example of the apple newton. The first iteration of the apple newton translated handwriting into text by looking at the entire writing as a whole whereas the second iteration looked at each letter individually. As a result, the second iteration was able to communicate more effectively with the user because it gives continuous feedback about each character rather than just giving feedback for the entire written text.


The author believes that natural, implicit, and sensible communication is the key to improving the interaction of humans and computers. The feedback to the user should be rich and complex while at the same time being communicated through a natural means. However, the output must also be easily understandable or the user will get no benefit out of it at all.


Discussion:


This reading is interesting because it goes into detail about the aspects of the communication between humans and machines. The author could have given more examples of communication that fit into his ideal communication of machines to humans. This work can be applied to several projects, including my group's project for capstone. In my group's project the user will need some sort of feedback to signal how the kinect is responding to their commands or the user may get frustrated.