Affordance, Conventions, and Design

Universal Principles of Design

Read these to prepare for class discussion

  1. Universal principles of design
    The Principle of Freeze-Flight-Fight-Forfeit, 110
  2. Universal principles of design
    The Principle of Errors, 82
  3. two relevant articles from the Nielsen Norman Group
    Emotional Design Fail: I'm Divorcing My Nest Thermostat
    Error Message Guidelines
  4. Norman, D. A. (1999). Affordance, conventions, and design. interactions, 6 (3): 38-43.
    [PDF]
  5. Norman, D. A. (1983). Design rules based on analyses of human error. Communications of the ACM, 26 (4), 254-258.
    [PDF]
  6. Norman, D.A. (1988). To err is human.
    In The Psychology of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books, 105-140.
    [TS171.4 .N67 1988]

Optional readings which may come up in class discussions

Rantanen, E.M., Palmer, B.O., Wiegmann, D.A., & Musiorski, K.M. (2006). Five-dimensional taxonomy to relate human errors and technological interventions in a human factors literature database. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 57 9), 1221-1232.
[PDF]

Hollan, J., Hutchins, E., & Kirsh, D. (2000). Distributed cognition: toward a new foundation for human-computer interaction research. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 7 (2), 174-196.
[PDF]
⇒ Read Sections 1 and 2 only

Useful, but not available online

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