The Design of Everyday Things- Chapters 5

Two Fundamental Caterogories
Slips- Result from automatic behavior, when subconscious actions that are intended to satify our goals get waylaid
Mistakes- Result from conscious deliberations

I like the example of a slip when the man takes of his watch instead of his seatbelt.

-Slips result from lack of attention
-Slips can be placed into six categories: Capture errors, Description errors, Data errors, Data-driven errors, associative activation errors, loss-of-activation errors, and mode errors.

* Slip confession*
I sometimes put the ice cream in the refridgorator instead of the freesor.

Much of economic theory is based upon the model of rational human who attempts to optimize personal benfit, utility, or comfort.

Schema theory, Frame theory,or sometimes semantic networks,and propositional encoding
Theory consists of three beliefs- that there is logic and order to the individual structures
that human memory is associative
that much of our power for depuctive thought comes from using the information in one schema

Conscious thought is severely limited by the small capacity of short term memory

-I thought this was pretty interesting
Explain away errors
Problems occur in are lives so often that we ignore them or dismiss them. " There are lots of things we could pay attention to or worry about but most would be false alarms, irrelevant minor events.
Here is what a designer should do

Understand the causes of error and design to minimize those cause
Make it possible to reverse actions-to undo them- or make it harder to do what cannot be reversed
Make it easier to discover the errors that do occur, and make them easier to correct
Change the attitude towards error