Chapter 2: The Psychology Of Everyday Actions
This chapter was interesting and made me really notice how often people blame themselves for not being able to properly use something. The other day, after the Thursday night Bears-Packers game, one of my friends was trying to put away a foldable table. Setting it up was really easy, and so was putting it away if you had read the instructions or had done it before. However, this friend of mine had never dealt with this kind of table before and was having trouble folding it up. It was fun watching him struggle so I didn't tell him, until several minutes later, that there was a small latch that needed to be pushed down while folding the table. After he finally got the table folded up, he said "My bad, dude." It was not until I read this chapter that I noticed he blamed himself for not being able to operate such a simple table. The culprit was the latch which was small, hidden, and the same color as all the other metal parts of the table, yet he blamed himself. There are plenty of other times that I've experienced similar scenarios, but never really payed attention to how people blamed themselves for poor designs. I also thought the way people think about thermostats and how they work in this chapter was interesting. I used to turn the stove on high to boil water faster, then turn it down once the water began boiling. My thinking was the heating coils would stay on longer if I turned it on high, which would result in a quicker heat up. I guess I was wrong!Chapter 3: Knowledge In The Head And In The World
The intro to the chapter was funny because this summer something similar happened to me when my uncle let me borrow his car. He asked me to move his car out of the driveway and park it near the curb. It was night time and it was a car I wasn't familiar with, so when I finished moving it and tried to take the keys out of the ignition, they didn't want to come out. I was outside trying to pull them out of the ignition for about 10 minutes and I didn't want to go inside and ask my uncle how to take them out because I would have felt dumb (maybe bad design?). I turned the steering wheel all the way in one direction and tried to take them out (works on MY car) but they were still stuck. Finally, I found a little button nearby, not labeled in any way, that needed to be pressed while taking the keys out. I though that was a real stupid way to have to take out keys, but it might have just been me being mad at spending 10 minutes outside for a simple task.I also liked the penny experiment. I had seen the experiment before and guessed the wrong penny and then figured out what the right answer was. Yet, my past experience with this experiment still did not help me guess the correct penny, this time. Like the book says, I guess I know how to use a penny, but it is so meaningless (worthless) in my life that I cannot distinguish the correct penny from a variation of pennies.
The remembering to remember section was another section of this chapter that I found interesting. Many people say they will remind themselves of certain things they need to do, but how are they going to remind themselves to remind themselves? I thought that was pretty funny, yet true.
Chapter 4: Knowing What To Do
I recently took an aerospace class and we talked about making cockpit controls have similar features/appearances so that they could be associated with the specific function, rather than having two similar looking controls and pushing one when you meant to push the other. We discussed making the control for the landing gear like a T-handle with wheels on either side to simulate a landing gear appearance. We also talked about making controls that looked like flaps for the flaps of the airplane. Pretty much the same scenario the book talked about, we talked about in that class.The part of eliminating feedback, like sound and visuals, to make the design more appealing is good to a certain extent. Sometimes I like to hear the sound of something on/running or I like to see that something is there. I like a confirmation that something is working/running, but if we start trying to eliminate all the "negative" feedback, some people are going to be confused as to whether the object is doing what they want it to. The fan in my room makes a lot of noise, but when I go to sleep I like to hear some noise so I sleep with it on all the time, even if it's freezing.
