The Psychology on How We Interact With Things

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All of our actions stem from goals. Goals represent the progress we want in comparison to the situation we are in now. Our actions are the steps we take to achieving our goals. When performing any action there are 7 stages and the matter a lot when dealing with everyday things.

The Seven Stages of Action

Goal: Having something you want to do or accomplish
Plan: What are the possible actions that be taken to accomplish the goal
Specify: What actions can I do now
Perform: How do I do it
Perceive: What happened?
Interpret: What does it mean
Compare: Is this Ok? Have I accomplished my goal?

The Seven Stages of Action can be broken down into two distinct phases. The steps taken to execute the action and the steps taken to evaluate the results of the execution. These two phases are called 
The Gulf of Execution: The effort a person must take to figure out how the thing operates. Aided by "Feedforward", info that lets you know what you can do such as signifiers, constraints and conceptual models.  
the Gulf of Evaluation: The effort a person must take to interpret the physical state of the environment/thing and how well expectations are met based on what action was performed. Aided by feedback.

The goal of the designer is to bridge the two gulfs.

Goals can and often are subgoals of original goals. For example a person's goal may be to become a smarter individual. That can lead to a goal to read more. That could lead to a goal of using the Kindle product on their desktop. All three can be seen as goals and there are a variety of actions that could have stemmed from that original goal (Listen to podcast, use podcast app etc.)

The Three Levels of Processing

Visceral: Fast and automatic. Comes from immediate perceptions (sight, smell, hearing, taste, etc.). Is responsible for our "gut feelings" and influences us much more than we think on a subconscious level
Behavioral: Learned processing. Solidified from practice. Appreciates feedback to maintain control
Reflective: Conscious evaluations of stimuli. A very aware process like consciously reacting to what a product label says

Every stage of action is linked with the 3 levels of processing.

Knowledge in Head v Knowledge in the World

People have limited capacities for memory, but many things require memory to use. When using products, we only need enough information to get our task done (satisficing.) We get away with this via combining Knowledge in our heads (memory) with knowledge in the world (product constraints, conceptual models).

Knowledge in the Head can be thought about as
Declarative Knowledge - Facts
Procedural Knowledge - Skills

The mechanisms we use to turn information into knowledge is memory
Short Term Memory - For quick use. Easy come but easy go memory
Long Term Memory - Takes longer to truly store, but can be retained much longer.

When using products, people must not only deal with the 7 steps of actions, and 3 levels of processing, but their limitations of knowledge and how it affects their inputs.

Reminding

Prospective memory is the task of remembering to do some activity at a future time. Mainly knowledge in the head. Effective when having to remember significant events. Not effective when having to remembering commonplace events.

Memory for the future is the ability to imagine future scenarios.

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The Psychology on How We Interact With Things

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