RR_03: Norman, D. A. (2002). The design of everyday things (1st Basic paperback. ed.). New York: Basic Books.

Norman's book is perhaps one of the most widely cited books in usability and human-computer interaction literature. With a foot in psychology, Norman explains the user's cognitive process as she/he interacts with technology in daily life, which Norman use to informs a user-centered design approach to design things from tea kettles to computers that can be easily used by the user. One reason for this book's success is that Norman explains in an understandable layperson's language the complexity of the interaction between human beings and the world, and provides many important basic concepts, frameworks, and principles that can be used to lay down a theoretical foundation for UCD. I'll discuss a few of them that relate to cultural Web usability and design.

First of all, Norman uses a model called “seven stages of action” to explain how human beings interact with the physical world (p. 48):

1. Forming the goal
2. Forming the intention
3. Specifying an action
4. Executing the action
5. Perceiving the state of the world
6. Interpreting the state of the world
7. Evaluating the outcome

The Seven Stages of Action

The “seven stages of action” has several implications to design and usability. First of all, it implies a goal-oriented usability design, which is very different from the task-oriented approach. Norman points out the difference between goals and tasks, which is often neglected by programmers and usability experts, according to Alan Cooper. Norman explains the relationship between goals and intentions below:

Goals do not state precisely what to do—where and how to move, what to pick up. To lead to actions goals must be transformed into specific statements of what is to be done, statements that I call intentions. A goal is something to be achieved, often vaguely stated. An intention is a specific action taken to get to the goal. (p. 46)

Here what Norman calls “intention” is what Cooper, among others, would call “task.” Good design should not design for tasks, but goals. Only focusing on tasks, designers or usability experts may lose the sight of what goals the user wants to achieve through these tasks. However, very often usability studies focus on testing how well the IT product, be it an application or a Web site, can afford the user's successful completion of tasks, rather than understanding how well the product can help the user achieve her/his goals. (Further discussion on the categorization of goals and goal-oriented design will follow later in my response to Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum.) In Norman's “seven stages of action,” the goal is put in an initiating position that guides the execution and evaluation of the action. Based on this understanding, usability research should start from the goals, instead of from the tasks. The first question to ask should be “What does the user wants to accomplish to make her/his life better?” rather than “(How fast) can the user complete task X?”

The goal-oriented approach in Web design and usability studies will be very useful when it comes to look at Web sites in various cultures. This is because people who have different values may want/need different things in their lives, and thus have different goals to achieve when using the Web. Therefore, by only testing the performance on completing pre-selected tasks, researchers already have made assumptions about the users' goals, and thus may miss out important and rich data that will tell us more about the users and what they expect for the technologies to fit in their lives.

Another implication of Norman's “seven stages of action” to cultural usability is that throughout every stage, the user's cultural background and the cultural context of the action are necessarily factors that affect the outcomes—the user's perception of the world, her/his choice of action, and her/his evaluation of the action, etc. Recognizing the complexity that the cultural contexts contributes to user's interaction with the world through technologies is crucial to designing IT products that benefits the users in world where cultural diverse is increasingly valued.

In his book, Norman also uses the framework of conceptual model and system image to explain how human beings interact with a device and why the design of the interface is critical. Norman defines he conceptual model as a model formed mentally of a device to “simulate its operation” (p. 12). The conceptual model consists of the design model, “the conceptualization that the designer has in mind” (p. 189), and the user's model, the user's “mental model developed through interaction with the system” (p. 16) and to “explain the operation of the system” (p. 189). Norman argues that “[i]deally, the user's model and the design model are equivalent” (p. 190). In other words, the user's model needs to match the design model for the user to properly use the system. However, this is not always the case in practice when the user's model and the design model mismatch. The breakdown, according to Norman, often happens in the system image, which is the link between the user's model and the design model. Because “the user and designer communicate only through the system itself: its physical appearance, its operation, the way it responds, and the manuals and instructions that accompany it” (p. 190), the design of the physical appearance, i.e., the interface, is crucial to user's interaction with the system.

Conceptual model is a very important concept in Norman's work. In fact, he argues that the two fundamental “principles of design for understandability and usability” are “(1) provide a good conceptual model and (2) make things visible” (p. 13). At a closer look, the two principles of design for usability are closely related if not overlapping, for to provide a good conceptual model, the design has to offer an accurate system image, which relies on the visible physical structure of the device, and a system that sends feedback to the user constantly so that the users will know what's going on. The importance of the conceptual model and visibility leads us to a discussion about affordances, constraints, and mappings, three qualities of technologies expressed through the visible structure of the system that communicate to the user the “clues to how things work” (p. 12).

Affordance, constraints and mappings are three important concepts that can be used to evaluate usability of technologies. Affordance is “the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used” (p. 9). Constraints are forces that control the permissible choices of actions can be taken with a product. Norman classifies constraints into physical, semantic, cultural, and logical constraints (pp. 84-86). Finally, mapping describes the relationship between “the controls and their movements and the results in the world” (p. 23). Norman especially emphasizes on the importance of natural mapping in design, which means “taking advantage of physical analogies and cultural standards, leads to immediate understanding” (p. 23).

These concepts are especially important to understanding usability for Web 2.0, for which the traditional usability guidelines have become inadequate. They can serve as a useful framework to guide the exploration of new usability criteria and issues for Web 2.0. The framework can help us examine the interaction between the user and Web 2.0 from the more fundamental goal-oriented perspective, and allow us to go beyond the scope of the older version of the Web and look at the Web with a fresh eye. I'll give a simple example. One difference between Web 2.0 and the older version, let's just call it Web 1.0 for convenience, is that Web 2.0 connects Web sites, applications, and users in a remarkable more extensive way than Web 1.0. As Bill Wolff and his colleagues in their article “Rethinking Usability for Web 2.0 and Beyond” point out, this interconnectedness poses new usability problems. One of them is related to sharing: “Whose responsibility is it to ensure the usability and functionality of each share on each page?” This is a emergent usability issue that is not addressed in traditional Web usability research and guidelines. However, through the lens of constraints, we can speak of a usability that takes account and even takes advantage of this constraint for Web 2.0.

To summarize, I will argue that precisely because of the very fundamental nature of Norman's work, it will be very useful in the usability research in a new Web environment of today.

References

Cooper, A. (2004). The inmates are running the asylum. Indianapolis, IN: Sams.

Wolff, W. I., Fitzpatrick, K., & Youssef, R. (2009). Rethinking usability for Web 2.0 and beyond. Currents in Electronic Literacy, (John Slatin Memorial Issue). Retrieved from http://currents.cwrl.utexas.edu/2009WolffFitzpatrickYoussef