HCI1: Human Factors

Guidelines

By now you have begun to delve into Donald Norman's book, "The Design of Everyday Things" and likely are beginning to develop a critical eye when interacting with the many "Everyday Things" that you encounter. This exercise will give you a chance to walk in Norman's shoes and practice looking at the world from his perspective.

Find an "Everyday Thing" (an object or class of objects, devices, tools, or whatever you want to call them) that you think has some design flaws according to the criteria set out by Norman. For this assignment there is a requirement that the "Everyday Thing" is located somewhere here on campus and that it is not computer hardware or software.

Topic Plan due Tuesday, December 9th

Hand in a one paragraph description of your "Everyday Thing". Describe what it is, where it is found, and provide a brief explanation of why it was chosen (consider criteria such as affordances, constraints, mappings, feedback, visibility, conceptual model).

In-class Presentation Wednesday, December 18th

Give a short (5 minutes) presentation of your "Everyday Thing" to the class. Obviously you will not be required to bring it in (might be impossible!) but please consider carefully how to convey the salient information to the class.

Your "Everyday Thing" may become the topic of your paper later in the course, although this is not a requirement. We will select several of the "Everyday Things" as topics of study later in the course when we learn about and practice contextual analysis. To get started, everyone will have a chance to share their "Everyday Things" with the class through these short presentations.