Norman

Norman

QUESTION 1

(a)Describe Norman's model of human information processing. Illustrate each step by reference to sending an email message to a friend to arrange an evening out. (200 words maximum)

A sensible alternative to the original conception of stores is one in which short-term storage consists of the elements within the long-term store that are currently in a heightened state of activation. Norman (1991) incorporated this view into his model of memory and attention, and the idea was strengthened by findings suggesting that features and concepts in long-term memory can be automatically activated by incoming stimuli. Norman (1991) presumed that “non-attended inputs remain only partially interpreted.” (Norman 1991, p. 528)

For example, while sending an email message to a friend to arrange an evening out, a message is first decoded to the morpheme or word level but that the temporal integration of these basic units into more meaningful structures is not performed in the absence of selection. On the receivers side (friend), a slightly different possible filter would be one in which only a partial feature set results from the automatic encoding (perhaps containing some semantic as well as structural features).

(b)Describe the gulfs of evaluation and execution and list three strategies that designers might use to bridge the gulfs. (100 Words)

The gulf of execution is the difference between the intentions of the users and what the system allows them to do or how well the system supports those actions. The gulf of evaluation is the degree to which the system/artifact provide representations that can be directly perceived and interpreted in terms of the expectations and intentions of the user (Norman 1988). The three strategies can be:

Designers need to consider a larger degree of diversity in background, development, and learning styles in the learner population.

The designer should designs a system in such a way ...