(Winograd and Flores, 1986). In the case of UIs and Web sites, rational design
focuses on the properties and rules of visual objects such as frames, forms, tables,
graphics, and maps, and interactive objects like buttons, selectable text, and
clickable regions in graphics. A rational analysis of an interface requires the
designer to run a mental simulation of a design to determine how users might
interact with it (e.g., Polson et al., 1992).
An obvious problem with rational design is that humans in general are not
rational thinkers. Rather than making rational decisions (that is, decisions made
simply on the basis of a logical analysis of all of the ...