Humane Interface, The: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems

Chapter Eight. Conclusion

One began to sympathize with the dog whose muzzle is removed at the end of a prolonged Muzzling Order, and who does not quite know what to do with himself.

—C. G. Grey (in Jane's All the World's Aircraft 1919)

If you start with the goal of making interfaces as simple as you can, taking account of our limitations and exploiting our abilities, there are two things you have to do. One is to understand what we can and cannot do, to study the maps of human thought presented by the science of cognitive psychology and see where they lead to the engineering discipline of cognetics. This book has followed one major highway from the map, one that leads from research into the division of abilities between our cognitive conscious ...