Reading Journal: Decisions, Actions, Perception

Due
12:00 noon, Monday, October 12
Preparation
Read chapters 12-14 of Jeff Johnson's Designing with the Mind in Mind:
  1. "Human Decision Making is Rarely Rational";
  2. "Our Hand-Eye Coordination Follows Laws";
  3. "We Have Time Requirements."
Submitting your work
Please post your response as a blog entry on CLEo.
Collaboration
Each student should turn in their own answers to the questions below. You may discuss the assigned readings with anyone you wish, but you should clearly acknowledge the source of any insights that come from outside your own reading of the text(s).
Evaluation
I will evaluate this assignment on the scale presented in the syllabus.
Note
I apologize for not making this reading available before the 4-day started. If you are traveling, I hope you have time to do this reading after you return.

Journal questions

  1. What was your approach to these readings? How far did you get? [metacognition]
  2. Describe a time when you interacted with a technology that seemed to take advantage of the principle that "human decision making is rarely rational." How does your example fit into the framework of Chapter 12? [analogy]
  3. Explain Fitts' Law and the Steering Law in your own words. (Not necessarily the equations - just the ideas.) [translation]
  4. Of all the durations presented in Table 14.1 ("How long does the brain take to...?") which do you think is the most important for interaction designers to know about? Why? [prioritization]
  5. What was the most intriguing thing you read? Quote a sentence or two. [prioritization]

Janet Davis (davisj@whitman.edu)

Created October 8, 2015
Last revised October 8, 2015

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.