Norman,“Emotion & Design: Attractive things work better”
In my opinion, the most interesting takeaway from the reading is when it talks about this “gut feeling” we have, like a sixth sense that immediately tells us what we want or do not want to deal with just based on how something looks. It is like a small light turns on in your brain from the beginning, and that already affects how willing you are to interact with something and how you are going to deal with it.
I also found the connection to the debugging video we saw earlier in class really clear. We talked about how when you are stressed or anxious, your thinking becomes very narrow and you get stuck. The reading explains this as “tunnel vision,” where you focus too much on one thing and cannot see other solutions. That might be useful in a survival situation, but for debugging or any kind of creative problem solving, it is the worst mindset to be in. It makes a lot of sense now why working while stressed feels so unproductive, because your brain is literally limiting your ability to think creatively.
Again, what stood out to me the most, especially because I am interested in design, is the idea that emotions happen before conscious thought. Because of course your brain is already reacting to a design before you even process it. I used to think usability and aesthetics were kind of separate, like one is how it works and the other is how it looks, but now I see that they are actually connected. This quote: If something makes you feel good, you are more likely to overlook small issues and just have a better experience overall. Is actually crazy to me, because I think this applies to many thinks, like for example the apple ecosystem. because of the aesthetics of it and how smoothly it runs even when it it loading, you could be waiting more time for something to download in a mac than on a windows laptop and you would feel like the mac is working better just for the aesthetics of it.
In future projects, I want to use design to influence how the user feels from the beginning. Since as the reading shows us, if I can make someone feel calm and comfortable, they will probably think more clearly, be more flexible, and have a much smoother experience using what I create.
Her Code Got Humans on the Moon
Reading about Margaret Hamilton really blew my mind. It is honestly incredible that a woman, and a working mother at that, was the one who made the moon landing possible during a time when women were not even encouraged to go into technical fields. What is even crazier to me is that she was the only one thinking about a backup plan or worst case scenarios. NASA literally told her that error checking code was not necessary because “astronauts were trained to be perfect.” To me, that is such a wild assumption because humans make mistakes all the time, but back then they just ignored that reality.
It actually makes so much sense to me that a mother would think this way. She saw her daughter, Lauren, accidentally crash a simulator by pressing a button that was not supposed to be used during flight, and she immediately understood that users will eventually do something they are not supposed to do. She used that to try to protect the astronauts from themselves, and it is honestly lucky she did. An astronaut on Apollo 8 made that exact same mistake, and Hamilton’s team had to spend nine hours figuring out how to fix it and get them home safely.
This whole idea of debugging and making systems intuitive for the user basically started with her. Before she came along, software was not even included in the official Apollo budget or schedule. She had to fight for her work to be taken seriously, even creating the term “software engineering” so it would be respected like other fields. It is insane to think that this one woman, working in what she called the “Wild West” of coding, helped create an entire field that now impacts the whole world. She did not just help us get to the moon, she helped shape the foundation of the modern digital world.