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People err. That is a fact of life. People are not precision machinery designed for accuracy. In fact, we humans are a different kind of device entirely. Creativity, adaptability, and flexibility are our strengths. Continual alertness and precision in action or memory are our weaknesses. We are amazingly error tolerant, even when physically damaged. We are extremely flexible, robust, and creative, superb at finding explanations and meanings from partial and noisy evidence. The same properties that lead to such robustness and creativity also produce errors. The natural tendency to interpret partial information -- although often our prime virtue -- can cause operators to misinterpret system behavior in such a plausible way that the misinterpretation can be difficult to discover.
View all 37 works by Norman, Donald A.
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Human Error and the Design of Computer Systems
http://jnd.org/dn.mss/error_design.html
Norman, Donald A.
JND.org
1999
Abstract: People err. That is a fact of life. People are not precision machinery designed for accuracy. In fact, we humans are a different kind of device entirely. Creativity, adaptability, and flexibility are our strengths. Continual alertness and precision in action or memory are our weaknesses. We are amazingly error tolerant, even when physically damaged. We are extremely flexible, robust, and creative, superb at finding explanations and meanings from partial and noisy evidence. The same properties that lead to such robustness and creativity also produce errors. The natural tendency to interpret partial information -- although often our prime virtue -- can cause operators to misinterpret system behavior in such a plausible way that the misinterpretation can be difficult to discover.
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