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An Interview With Donald A. Norman

Posted on: Wednesday, 5 October 2005, 06:00 CDT

By Zachry, Mark

Cross-Disciplinary Exchanges

As a prominent advocate for the users of consumer technologies, Donald A. Norman has influenced thinking and research in many fields, including product design, usability, and technical communication. Arguably the best-known popular voice for user- centered design in the United States, Norman has shaped the language people employ to talk about technologies ranging from teapots to robots. He is, for example, largely responsible for popularizing the concepts of affordances and constraints in how people think about the design of user interfaces.

For many, the intellectual appeal of Norman's work has been his uncovering of the logic behind the design of objects in the contemporary world. As he discusses throughout his work, the design of objects that are meant to assist humans in their work and entertainment is too often flawed in some fundamental way(s). The origins of the flaws are many, ranging from the neglect of design work by organizations more focused on other business matters to designers working in isolation from the ultimate users of the objects. Norman's work provides a reasoned and thorough analysis of why people are so often frustrated by technology, and, more importantly, a framework for conceptualizing and talking about user- centered design. His work, for example, has helped expand recent conversations about the practice and value of usability testing.

Cognitive psychology provides the basis for Norman's work. Using concepts such as mental models, feedback systems, and mapping, Norman discusses the designed world in terms of how that world operates in people's minds. In this interview, however, he is careful to distinguish between his work and the work of those involved in basic science and research. The purpose of his current efforts is to take the work of those involved in basic science and research in fields such as biology, neuroscience, and psychology and apply it to thinking about design.

As he explains in this interview, his newest book, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, marks a significant change in his thinking. Specifically, he develops a theory of design that moves well beyond his earlier, almost exclusive focus on issues of utility and usability. Theorizing that emotional responses to design are as important as behavioral or visceral response, he provocatively explores the idea that appealing things work better. He arrived at these ideas because he sensed a mismatch between his thoughts as a traditional cognitive scientist and life as he experienced it as a person. Observing that as a person designs appealed to him in a contingent fashion, depending upon such things as context and his own mood, he recognized that he needed a theory of design that could provide a way of accounting for how variations in culture, individual experiences, and personal histories operate in how people respond to designed objects.

Although technical communication has never been a central concern in Norman's work, it has been a recurring consideration as his theories of design have developed over the years. In some of his earliest popular work, for example, Norman discussed the integral role that various forms of technical communication play in successful design. As he explains in The Design of Everyday Things, technical communication works in conjunction with the physical structure of designed objects to create a system image of a given device. The failure of a system image to communicate the designer's intention to the end user produces a flawed mental model that almost always has negative implications (e.g., frustration with technology, misuse of devices). And although much of what Norman is concerned with is helping designers change their practices so that devices do not require copious amounts of documentation, he acknowledges that technical communication is always necessary for anything more than simple objects: "Complex devices will always require some instruction, and someone using them without instruction should expect to make errors and be confused." In short, Norman holds the position that design and technical communication work are not distantly related activities, but integrated with one another.

Along these lines, Norman has famously advocated the idea that technical communicators should play a much more central role in the design work of organizations. As he sympathetically notes in The Invisible Computer, technical communicators are too often assigned the "cleanup job," being called in when "all is finished" so that they "can make it look like the entire design was carefully orchestrated as a systematic whole." As an alternative, he advocates a radical reversal of work within organizations, wherein technical communicators do their work at the beginning of the process, composing the "most elegant manual imaginable," which then forms the basis for the subsequent work of others. To recognize his contributions to the field of technical communication, the Society for Technical Communication (STC) made Norman an Honorary Fellow in 1996, and in 2001 he received a Rigo award from the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on the Design of Communication (ACM SIGDOC) for outstanding lifetime contribution to the field of user documentation.

Norman's early career was spent as an academic researcher in cognitive science and psychology. During that time he published several academic books, including Memory and Attention: An Introduction to Human Information Processing (1969) and Learning and Memory ( 1982). He was also editor of the journal Cognitive Science and series editor for Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates' cognitive science series. In the late 1980s, however, his work came to the attention of a much larger population when he published his widely read trade book, The Psychology of Everyday Things (which was two years later reprinted as The Design of Everyday Things).

Norman is professor of computer science and psychology at Northwestern University. He is professor emeritus of both cognitive science and psychology at the University of California, San Diego, where he served as the chairperson of both of these departments. After earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Pennsylvania respectively, Norman earned a PhD in mathematical psychology from University of Pennsylvania. He has also received an honorary degree from the University of Padua in Italy. He is fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, and the American Psychological Society.

Outside academe, he has held executive positions at companies such as Hewlett Packard and at Apple Computer, where he was vice president of research and head of Apple's Advanced Technology Group. In addition to pursuing his career in publishing, Norman serves on the advisory board for several technology and education companies, institutes, and organizations. He is cofounder and principal in the Nielsen Norman Group, a California-based consulting corporation.

This interview occurred February 11, 2005, at Norman's residence in Palo Alto, California.

MAJOR RECENT PUBLICATIONS

BY DONALD A. NORMAN

2004 Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things

1998 The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the PC Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Answer

1993 Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine

1992 Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles

1990 The Design of Everyday Things (Reprint of The Psychology of Everyday Things, 1988)

EMOTIONS AND DESIGN

TCQ: Your latest book represents a significant departure from your previous work. Why have you shifted from focusing almost exclusively on behavioral responses to design to now theorizing about the importance of emotional responses?

Norman: Well, I simply looked around in the world. I looked around and observed the world and I found this huge discrepancy between how people are behaving (including me) and the theoretical work I was doing as a cognitive psychologist. I decided the work that I was doing-not that it was wrong-but rather it was incomplete. Incomplete in some serious ways. So, I've been trying to incorporate much more to account for emotions. The problem with emotion was that it was clearly something important, but-at least according to the old philosophy-it was something to overcome. Fortunately I was able to work with colleagues who had been doing work on emotion for years and to get caught up in this idea and to realize how the emotions are simply an information-processing system. Emotions are very powerful and work in fundamentally different ways than the cognitive system. But they are also intertwined. I liked that. From the moment I began to consider this, it made sense and helped put things together.

I'm trying to incorporate even more thinking about emotion into my work by looking at the stages of user experience: when you first hear about something, when you first try it or first don't try it, when you then live with it, and, finally, when you later on reminisce about it. Some of this work shows that the stuff we care the most about is the stuff that has a sto\ry-and that can't be designed in. So I'm trying to expand. I've been looking at the iPod- the Apple iPod. One of the interesting things about the iPod, one of the things that people love most about it is not the technology; it's the box it comes in. That's because Apple really understood that the iPod was not about the iPod; it was about the entire experience: the way they design their stores, the box it comes in, the iTunes website, the ease of getting the user back and forth.

TCQ: In Emotional Design, you say that emotions are integrally linked to cognition. Elsewhere, you have discussed the relationship between objects in the world and human intelligence. How are these ideas connected?

Norman: I have always held that it is things that make us smart. But emotions help us navigate through the world, help us make decisions.

TCQ: Your writing for general audiences has consistently seemed to take emotion into account. For example, your use of stories, humor, conversational tone. But only recently have you seemed to incorporate emotion into your perspective on design more generally conceived. How have your ideas on design, including emotional design, influenced your understanding of writing and your own style in your books and on your website?

Norman: I think they've gone hand in hand. I had an early essay called "Writing as Design: Design as Writing." Both of them are human activities meant to communicate to the reader or to the user, so they both have things in common. I believe that. I also believe that you have to motivate people; you have to explain why this is relevant to people. People understand things that have a personal connection, which is where stories play a very important role in human behavior. In some sense, that is what you want a good design to do-which is to guide you through the story.

TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION

TCQ: You have written often about the importance of enjoyment in the learning process. Similarly, in your most recent book, you've discussed satisfaction at the reflective level being so important to successful design. In that book you ask, "Why must information be presented in a dull, dreary fashion?" Extending this line of thinking, do you see the potential for fun to be incorporated into the design of technical communication, and if so, how might technical communication be different from what it is today?

Norman: First, let me make a comment about pleasure and fun in learning. It can also be really hard work, so let's not forget that. Learning complex topics is hard. A good example is when I decided to learn the piano and I looked at a whole bunch of piano books and they all seemed perfectly dull. But fortunately, Bach understood, and so he wrote a group of suites that are relatively easy pieces and really pleasant and fun. That's what I started with. I'm not sure a teacher would do that, but that's what I started with. I painstakingly go through the pieces; it's probably really painful for people around me. It's painful for me. But I enjoy it very much. It's hard work and I make mistakes, but it's very pleasurable. So it's really important to indicate that learning doesn't have to be easy.

On the other hand, sometimes it is helpful to have a sense of humor. Tivo, for example, does a really nice job with their device. I'm not sure if their manual follows the same sense of humor, but I have seen manuals that do show a sense of humor. Here is a trivial example, but I like it so much I actually took a photograph of this and use it in my talks. It comes from the A-1 Sauce bottle:

"Shake well. If there's only one drop left, a more extreme form of shaking may be required, like dancing or jumping jacks. You can do it. Yeah, it's that important."

Everyone knows these sorts of sauces should be shaken before using, but these instructions give you a nice feeling about the product and are probably more likely to make you shake.

TCQ: Do you see any potential connections between the concept of play, as you describe it in Emotional Design, and the work of technical communication? For example, there are some in the field of technical communication who are now actively engaged in the study of video games, something that you've taken a longtime interest in, too. Does this seem like a right-minded pursuit given your theory of emotional design?

Norman: The real question is, "Why?" There's a lot to be learned from video games, a lot to do with video games, but simply knowing that people are looking at video games doesn't tell us enough to know whether it's a good thing or a bad thing.

Text plays a very important role in instruction, and I don't think it will ever go away. However, for many kinds of instructional situations, text has always been a problem. Isn't one of your first exercises in learning how to communicate to write a description of how to tie your shoelaces? The point being that it's basically impossible to use text to show that. Clearly what I would like to use is some simple animation, not just diagrams, but animation. Maybe animation where the person could play it back and forth. So I think animation and cartoon figures can play a very important role, but it's not because the world has changed around multimedia, people's attention spans are way down, and no one knows how to read anymore. I don't think anyone ever knew how to read, attention spans have always been short, and textual material is often the wrong material to describe complicated things. That's why we have diagrams and photographs and drawings and animations-making visible what is otherwise un-visible.

Once again, whether studying video games is relevant or not, I can imagine cases where it is, and I can imagine cases where it's completely irrelevant. The video-game people, mind you, don't know what they're doing. They're artists. Now many of our advances come from artists, but they don't know what they're doing-I mean consciously they don't know. They don't have a good theory-but they really have a good feeling for what works and doesn't. What the scientist has to do is look at art and try to understand why it works.

TCQ: In your work, you place a high value on communication that helps explain technology to people because of the need for human learning and reflection. For example, you point to a museum experience as an instance where people were awed by the bells and whistles of technology, but didn't really learn anything. You then contrast that experience with that of a smaller museum where the displays included explanations. Does your recommendation along these lines signal an even greater role for technical communicators and people with technical communication skills?

Norman: I think so-absolutely-because just putting explanatory labels in a museum isn't going to get you there. There has to be somebody who understands what a museum goer is doing and how much time they have. And are they with kids, or not. One of the interesting things that is happening in museums is the development of audio scripts, which have gotten better and better. The good ones don't constrain museum goers to a single path. The player knows where you are in the museum and can tell you about things around that room. Some of the best give you alternative explanations depending upon your prior knowledge. A museum visitor may say, I don't want to say I'm a novice in art, because there might be an instance where I understand this painting, but I've never seen that one. So I want an expert's review of this one. Or maybe about this one, Don't tell me anything, I already know about it. And then I want a beginner's view of that one. Or a new perspective. That's actually been intriguing. I've been watching the development of these audio players, including my own reaction. Years ago, I never would have thought of listening to an audiotape. Now I find these audio players enhance the experience considerably.

TCQ: In The Invisible Computer you suggest that the technical communicator should write the manual first-before anyone, including the engineers, are involved with a product. Why?

Norman: I have said for years and years that technical communication is the best practice for creating a design spec because technical communicators begin by asking, what do we tell people about this? What is the neatest thing I could tell them? What is the simplest message? How can I describe this in the easiest way?

In good places, such as the design firm IDEO, that's the philosophy they follow. But the problem with IDEO is that they are a design firm, so they are a bit limited by who calls them, and the companies that tend to call them are the companies that are already enlightened and understand this process. So while they do really good work, it would be nice if this philosophy was applied across a greater range.

TECHNOLOGY AND COMMUNICATIVE PRACTICES

TCQ: In Emotional Design, you discuss the appeal of interactive communication and technologies, claiming that this appeal is largely due to the fact that these technologies facilitate shared emotions. You caution, however, that as these technologies become more and more pervasive, we seem to be drifting toward increasingly shallow forms of interaction and communication. To remedy this, you recommend broad social decisions about how to limit the uses of ubiquitous communication technologies. Is this something that you believe is likely, or will we more likely be looking back twenty years from now and wishing we'd followed your advice?

Norman: Yes, the continually divided attention problem. We're sitting here having a conversation, and it is my assumption that we will be uninterrupted for the entire duration. But more and more, that's less and less possible. Certainly with my students that wouldn't be possible. Their phones would be buzzing with SMS [Short Message Service] messages, or they'd be receiving cell phone calls for which they would have to excuse themselves. A lot of this interactionis useful because it helps maintain social ties to people who would otherwise disappear. But on the cautionary side of this, we can never get any deep thinking done. This is a problem because a lot of work gets done by deep concentration, which requires working it through and a lack of interruptions.

TCQ: Do you anticipate that we are going to see noticeable social ramifications of this erosion of deep thinking?

Norman: I'd like to think that we will not. I'd like to think that while more and more people wander about with earphones always on, listening to music or phone calls, or with little vibrators telling them that people are sending them text messages or video messages or pictures, serious people will know that they need concentration. They will simply make sure that they get it.

It's easy to keep talking to people, but it's also not that hard to turn it off. The major problem is the temptation. That is, if you are a writer, you know that when you sit down to write something that the last thing on earth you want to do is write it. You actually welcome those interruptions. On your computer, there is the Web. And you say, I just need to look up something. Those temptations exist today, but they've always existed. I remember a writer complaining that his wife gave him a birthday present. She redid his study and put all his favorite books in it. And he said, that's the last thing on earth the writer wants, is his favorite stuff.

TCQ: As the author of an expansive and frequently updated website, and then also the author of text in a completely different medium-books-you've probably developed insights into writing as design that is different in these two mediums. You anticipated some of this at the end of The Design of Everyday Things, when you talked about hypertext. Now, many years later and with all these experiences behind you, what do you think differently about writing for the Web versus writing books?

Norman: The Internet is a really excellent source of information, but it is not a good spot for people to read long, detailed things. So writing for the Internet has to follow journalistic writing, which is the inverted triangle. The most important things are the first paragraph or two. If it is to be a long article, I think you should assume that it is actually a printed article and therefore that people will actually print it. So I advise writing in journalistic style-short segments that get to the message quickly. Get to the major points in the first paragraph or two. If Icare, I'll read the rest or print it out. Now when you are writing a trade book for the general public, these are generally people who don't really want to work hard to understand the message. When I read a trade book, I don't want to work hard. I read it late at night just before I'm going to bed. The last thing I want is to have to struggle to understand. That's where making it flow really helps. That's where the story usually helps. This doesn't mean you should shy away from difficult concepts, but it means you have to present them in an easier form to understand. A textbook has again yet another set of problems because it is being read by novices. There you should assume that they are going to spend some time puzzling over and that there are people around them to help them. So it has to be elementary with terms explained, with diagrams, but you assume that people will spend the time to understand. And last is the scientific paper. There are really two ways that you can do a scientific paper. One is you give a quick glance to the abstract and the introductory paragraphs and the concluding paragraphs, when you want to get a rough idea of what it is about. And for most of the papers in the sciences, that is all that we do. But when you hit a paper that is very relevant to what you are working on, then you go back and read in great detail. So the scientific paper has to first of all allow for this quick reading so that you can know what it's about, but when you really have questions you can go in and puzzle over it, spend time thinking about it, reading all the details. You assume that the reader is actually going to work very hard. These all call for very different styles. In fact, if you make a scientific paper very interesting-you tell some good stories-it will have to be rejected because [people think] you are not taking it seriously.

TCQ: So it sounds like you are making a distinction between the Web as a way of viewing a text and as a way of delivering a text. In some instances, the Web may be of most value to information consumers simply as a means of receiving a text to be printed.

Norman: Yes, absolutely. So when I talk about scientific papers and textbooks and trade books, there's no reason that they could not come over the Internet, but I think that they are longer and people are going to want to print them.

TCQ: On the future of information appliances you say on your website that we should not have to know how they work; we should not need to know anything about their technology. All we need to know is our job and what we are trying to accomplish. As designers build more and more intelligence into the appliances that humans routinely interact with, what is it that you see we are enabling people to do otherwise? That is, as users are required to know less and less about the technologies they use, what are they being freed up to do?

Norman: The goal is to free up people to do their jobs, their entertainment, their enjoyment-whatever they're trying to accomplish- without worrying about the technical details. When I want to watch a television set, I don't want to have to know about high-definition television specifications and 5.1 surround sound and know how to connect everything up. I just want to watch the show. When I play the piano, it's actually an incredibly complicated hammer movement that makes the hammer strike the strings. Or, in my case, I have the complicated hammer movement, but there are no strings; it's an electronic piano. All I know is that it sounds just like a real piano. It feels just like a real piano. And I'm trying to learn how to play. But people don't realize how technological the instrument is-the piano. It's very complicated inside. And it's in that sense you shouldn't have to know. Many of the devices 1 our homes have become more complicated inside and less complex outside. Remember the early days of television when you had to adjust the hue and vertical sync? It was hard to get a channel. If you turned the channel, you had to do a lot of fine-tuning. Now, all that's done, taken care of. Same with the automobile. The automatic choke. The automatic spark advance. The automatic shifting. The automatic antilock braking. Automatic stability control. When those are working properly, we don't have to know they are there. They just help us do what we care about, which is either enjoy driving, or some people don't even care about driving because for them it's just transportation from here to there. And actually we build different kinds of cars for those people, or in a few cases we build a car that can be adjusted. You can put it in a sports setting, or you can put it in a comfort setting. That's what I'd like to see: We have control so we can focus upon the parts or the task or engage with things that we care about. Sometimes I care about the manipulation, like when I drive a highly tuned sports car. And sometimes I just want to get to the place.

RESEARCH

TCQ: Research methods and methodologies are topics that are actively being discussed in the technical communication field now. On your website, you caution against logical analysis as a good way to predict people's behavior; you also talk about the limitations of focus groups and surveys, arguing instead that observation is key to understanding human behavior. What is it that researchers can observe in human activity that they cannot discover otherwise?

Norman: How people behave. In my consulting business, the most common statement I make to clients is that the problem with the story you just told me is it's too logical. The difference between logic and emotion is that emotion emphasizes the things that we value. A lot of behavior is driven by emotion; in fact, it sometimes violates logic. Sometimes we don't know it, and sometimes we do know it and we don't care: "I just like to do it this way-I know it's better to do it that way, but I like to do it this way." And that's why I think it's essential to watch people.

At the same time, a lot of behavior is culturally determined as well. It isn't that all people are the same; it depends on what culture they are in. By culture in this sense, I mean a microculture. Middle-aged parents of grade-school soccer players is a subculture. I have a feeling that people in that subculture will behave in ways consistent with that subculture, including what kind of cars they have and what they carry with them. And those same people also belong to many other subcultures and behave differently in those subcultures. They dress differently; they talk differently. So researchers have to watch and have to spend time doing so because when they first start watching, they may not even know what they are looking for.

TCQ: In The Invisible Computer you talk about the field of activity theory, a perspective that has become increasingly important in the field of technical communication. Is this a research approach that you still feel is profitable to mine?

Norman: I think it forms a basis for what I do, but then I've always believed that activities are core. Let's take manuals as an example. So many manuals take a device, and say, here are all the buttons. Let me explain each one. And the user says, no, I just want to know how to work it. What I really want [to know] is, what is my activity? What am I doing? What should I do?

I think that manuals are much better when based on the activities we do\, yet so many of them are not. They are so hard to read and to understand because I have to figure out what it is that I want to do and then figure out what operation I want to do and then search the pages for the button that does it. And then read a description of the button. And oftentimes, that description is not in the language of the way I'm thinking at the moment. So an activity focus is very important.

TCQ: Your work echoes the call from other quarters, including technical communication, to consider the user and task at the early stages of design. As you point out, there have been some inroads, such as the Scandinavian model. Do you now see a notable shift in industry toward these user considerations in the initial stages of design? Or is the situation as bleak as it always has been?

Norman: Yes, I see a very positive shift at more and more companies where more and more products are being designed with teams that have communication designers, usability people, the engineers, working all together at the beginning. But as fast as we get more and more of those, others are ignoring these ideas. Look at this piano I have. It's a wonderful piano. I love it. It feels good, but yuck! This is a Roland piano. A Roland HP-107. It has a truly excellent feel. Excellent sound. Wonderful keyboard. Wonderful sampling. But whoever designed this [manual] has no understanding of people. The manual is almost impossible to read. Their website is one of the worst websites in the world. After a great deal of searching you can find this manual on the website, but it won't let you print it out. God knows why. I love settings you can make on the piano, adjusting what the piano sounds like and levels-very simple settings. But, when you turn off the power, you lose all the settings. Now if you don't want to lose the settings, according to the manual, what you do is:

(1) Hold down the split button and press the chorus button. The HP-107 switches to the set mode.

(2) Press the metronome/count in button. The button's indicator flashes. The following appears on the display. Lower case b, lower case u, capital p. (Whatever that means. That's because they used a cheap display and it couldn't display real things.)

(3) Press the R-E-C [record button]. Memory backup is executed and when memory backup is finished, the display and buttons return to their normal appearance.

That's bizarre. Just bizarre. At the very least they should have a button that says "save" or something. This is a company in trouble. They just don't get it. In the modern age like this, they have such bizarre procedures. And I showed you just the simplest thing. There's a lot worse in this manual.

TCQ: A dominant theme in your work is that social structures have tremendous influence over designs. You say that poor designs contribute to human frustrations and usability problems, but that it is often societal norms and standards including economic, political, and legal constraints that prohibit designs from being more human centered. Could you talk about some examples and where the greatest challenges/barriers lay?

Norman: Well, here's an example. The Roland HP-107 manual. Page 1, it says: "Main features.... It's a wonderful device.... Pursuing the playing field of grand piano expressiveness, etc., etc." Page 2: "Important safety instructions.... save these instructions." Who's ever going to read them? Page 3: "Using the unit safely.... Always observe the following.... Warning.... Warning.... Caution.... Caution." Page 4: "Warning.... Warning.... Caution.... Caution." Page 5: "Important notes.... In addition to the items listed under important safety instructions, to use the unit safely be sure to read and observe the following. Do not connect this unit to the same electrical outlet as being used for an electrical appliance, like a refrigerator.... Placement.... Maintenance.... Repairs.... Additional precautions." Page 6: "Important notes." And then finally on page 7, we hit the contents. And it isn't until page 10 that we get to the manual. And even there they don't say I just want to play the piano; no, I have to go through every single button, and it explains what each does.

TCQ: You have talked about the importance of communication in supporting activities involving distributed cognition, flight- control rooms, for example. But rather than focusing on formal communication and written genres as the ways to coordinate and regulate the work in human activity, your focus tends to be on the importance of informal communication-the human interactions that go on while the work is taking place. Could you elaborate on why these informal means of communication are so important and whether this is what communication and design researchers should be attending to more closely?

Norman: In many ways the formal communication is the easy part. It involves simple task analysis of things such as air-traffic control or making hamburgers or something. This is the formal communication that must be transmitted. But, in fact, people doing their jobs encounter difficulties, have differences of opinion, or have social rank differences that try to assert themselves. And that, actually, is an integral part of the work, but all through informal communication. Last week, I heard a talk by Ed Hutchins, who I used to work with, and he was talking about cognitive ethnography. He was talking about watching groups of people make decisions. In his example, tensions came about when several people were looking at a map trying to decide how to navigate: what points on a map should a person be looking for? One person he observed was trying to assert himself all the time while others suggested one or another navigation point. How important is that? I think it is actually very important to the overall operation of the group, to its effectiveness.

There is an old study in aviation that describes how when pilots lowered the landing gear in old-fashioned planes they did so with a huge lever. In new planes, manufacturers tried replacing that lever with a little toggle switch or a computer-controlled button. From the formal point of view, they were identical in that both lowered the landing gear. But what was interesting about the lever was that if a pilot was going to lower the landing gear and the lever was on the first officer's side, he had to lean over and push it down. And so, without ever saying anything, the first officer always knew what had happened. But that got lost when they switched to a simple control. Afterward people could go back and look and say [that] that communication was important. But beforehand, nobody realized that it was.

TCQ: How does research methodology need to change to produce useful information on human-centered design? For example, you discuss the value but also the pitfalls of hard science and data collection such as researchers who measure what they can measure instead of measuring what matters.

Norman: I think there is a tendency in science to measure what is measurable and to decide that what you cannot measure must be uninteresting. Science, though, has made huge progress in part because of measurement. What science is really about is not a body of facts, but it's a method that one person can make a finding and other people can too. Scientists are always skeptics. When we hear something we say, oh, I don't believe that. And what is important about science is that there is enough precision in the way the results were reported that the other person can repeat exactly what was happening and either say I found the same thing or not. To do that, it really helps if there is a neutral measurement scheme. Somebody says my people are happy, somebody else says my people are not, and you don't really know what that means. So I'm very sympathetic to those who wish to measure. The problem is that you need to measure in a way that captures the important things.

TCQ: Your new theory of the three levels of design offers a way of accounting for emotional responses to design. As a corollary to this expanded view of how people interact with designed objects, you argue that usability is a more complex topic than most people acknowledge. A product that does what is required and is understandable may still well not be usable you say. What are the implications of an overly simplified view of usability for researchers?

Norman: I think the usability community is in trouble. That is, they are not making sufficient impact on products. Their story is like that of the design community. Still, today, the marketing people conceive of the product, the engineers build it, and when we are finished we call in the usability people to certify that it's usable or to make it usable. And then the design community to make it pretty. And no real designer desires to do that because their hands are tied. They can barely do anything. And no usability person likes that because it is too late to make any fundamental changes. And it is the same in the technical communication community. They are called in afterwards to write up something that meets all the legal requirements and makes the customers happy-that explains how to use it. People in industry don't take those manuals very seriously, calling in the technical writers far too late to do a decent job. And that's exactly what happens in the design and usability communities.

THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUALAND ETHICS

TCQ: In your current book you discuss how automated technologies, particularly robots, will introduce new questions about the ethical implications of technologies that we design and produce. This raises interesting questions about the role of ethics in design. What are your thoughts about the place of ethics in design?

Norman: Well, I don't want to knock ethics, obviously, but I'm not sure that the full responsibility is the designer's. I think the designer is one piece of a large team. And even if they are a well- functioning t\eam where everybody is working together, the designer is just one piece. So when we talk about ethics and design we are talking about a wide range of topics: Is this a device that we should be building in the first place? Is this harmful to people? Or does it have mixed blessings? It is offensive to some people? Is it made in an energy efficient way? Is it recyclable? A big ethical question is what happens after people stop using the device. Does it degrade the environment? Could it have been designed so it would actually be good for the environment? Another aspect of ethics is who can use this? What if I have a disability? I may have disabilities that don't preclude me from the activities, but they do exclude me from this device simply for arbitrary reasons. All of these are important ethical considerations. The designer plays a role in pointing them out. But I think overall it is really the responsibility of the corporation.

TCQ: Your books and website are largely designed to educate a broad reading public about design issues. Do you think as a general rule that academics should devote more effort to similarly finding ways to bring ideas to the general public?

Norman: Well, there's a variant on that. The answer to that is, "Well, yes." But there's a "but...." Much of academic work is academic and not of much interest to many people. It's often of no interest to anybody except a very narrow range of other academics. So the first answer is I'd recommend that academics do much more of their research on topics that are of fundamental importance. There's a wonderful book called Pasteur's Quadrant in which Donald Stokes argues that there is an old feeling that researchers do pure basic science that leads to applications and building things. The story is that that's never happened before. Stokes argues strongly that what Pasteur did is first identify a real social problem he was trying to solve. Then, in an attempt to solve it, he had to do some fundamental things, to do some research-deep research-but it was towards the goal of solving this fundamental public problem. That is, I really think, the best way to do research.

Explaining to the public the esoteric, specialized stuff that academics do is always going to be hard. But there's a reason for explaining it if it actually makes a difference in people's lives. That makes the explanation much easier. Now there's a slight problem here. If an academic author writes clear, simple, easy-to-read books that explain to others the work that author is doing and its relevance, your academic colleagues look down on you. Such books are called trade books, and trade book authors are often not treated well by their academic colleagues. This is amusing because their academic colleagues actually read a lot of these scientific trade books in other fields because that's how they learn about a field that they are not in. But if it's about a field that they are in, they think, ah, that's just shallow. Of course it's shallow-it's written for the general public. I've talked to a lot of authors in this situation. I actually don't feel that it has hit me, but it probably has. The people who manage this best are those who have made their scientific reputation first and then tried it.

TCQ: What you're describing seems to have some connection to the call in some academic circles for a more public intellectualism or the idea that academics have some sort of an obligation, whether it is social or ethical, to insert themselves into the world and make a difference in a broader way.

Norman: I think that sounds wonderful in principle. In practice, I don't think it always works. When academics are away from their own disciplines they are no better versed than the average citizen and can make just as ridiculous statements as the average citizen. That's part of our culture. The movie star gets to make pronouncements about foreign policy and economic issues, and once you win a Nobel prize, oh wow, you are now an expert on everything in the world, but you're not. The problem is when academics who are famous and noble and excellent in their research area start making strong pronouncements on topics they know nothing about. It's the worst kind of know-nothingness because they don't know that they know nothing.

TCQ: Are there alternatives that are more appropriate? Don't academics have an obligation to the public?

Norman: Do we have an obligation? Yes. Most of the senior people I know actually do a lot of public service in the National Academies, the National Research Council, and their own societies. They serve on lots of government committees.

TCQ: Do you have any sense yet of how your ideas about emotional design are being received, either in your consulting work or in cognitive science circles?

Norman: Well, in the real world, they are being received quite well. So as a consultant, my problem is that I'm being asked to do more than I can possibly do. In academic circles, I really don't know. Although I'm still a professor, I'm not a traditional professor that gets graded and rated in normal ways.

My academic colleagues probably think that what I'm doing is not good science, and I would agree with them. I'm not trying to do basic science. What I am trying to do is to understand what we know from science and apply it. That's a very different business. A number of my colleagues might like the work but say that we'd never hire him for this department. That's probably appropriate. If I were going to be hired in any department, it should probably be a design department or a marketing department.

FUTURE PROJECTS

TCQ: Your website indicates that your current project is "engaging the customer." Can you tell us more about this project and its relationship to your existing publications?

Norman: I observed that most of the focus in product design is on the product itself, and I realized that's just a small piece of it. Companies have to get a person interested in the first place, but they also have to get them excited about all of the stuff surrounding the product and the experience they have afterwards. The BMW Mini Cooper does a fine job of being a really cute, wonderful device. They make their car follow that principle. It's fun to drive. But after you've bought a Mini Cooper, they never let you forget it. They keep sending you cute little gimmicks and pop-outs and things. But they do it in a nonoffensive way; they do it in a way that people seem to enjoy. Similarly, I've been looking at stores and saying, if I want to buy candy, what am I going to choose? You go to the store and there's twenty or thirty feet of candy and they all look the same. The packaging is really what's critical. Part of our life is that there are really too many choices. If you can simplify the choices, people will actually be much happier. So I am trying to focus on all of the things that go around a product. The phrase I use to describe this is "the product is more than the product."

TCQ: On the long-term horizon, what other projects do you anticipate undertaking?

Norman: I never know. I just let them happen. I'm thinking about several different directions right now. My experience is that when it isn't crystallized in my head, if I describe what it's going to be, it will never be that. I often don't know what a book is going to be about until I've finished writing it.

TCQ: But clearly you have not finished thinking about these matters or exhausted your curiosity.

Norman: Well, as far as I can tell, I've just started thinking about these matters.

Mark Zachry

Utah State University

Copyright Association of Teachers of Technical Writing Autumn 2005

Source: Technical Communication Quarterly; TCQ

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