steve kwan user experience designer

Humour journal, entry #4

(February 26th, 2007 - 6:50PM)

I was doing my laundry the other day. As I emptied my dirty laundry hamper into the washing machine, I noticed that I had filled my hamper with some used towels, gym clothes, shirts...and an apple core. I suppose the apple core wound up in there because I was going to throw it out, but in my absent-mindedness I threw it into the laundry hamper instead of the trash.

Donald Norman, Computer Scientist and Cognitive Scientist, calls this type of error a slip. A slip is basically an error that occurs when your subconscious gets mixed up. The particular type of slip I made above is called a description error: when you do the right action, but on the wrong item. The action (throwing out an apple core) was correct; the item (into the laundry hamper) was not.

The thing about slips is that they tend to be very amusing. My brother has a recurring slip: when he notices there's no more toilet paper in the bathroom, he'll go into the garage (where my parents keep the extra toilet paper), grab a roll, take it back to the bathroom, and throw the whole roll into the toilet. For those interested, this type of slip is called a capture error.

Because my area of interest is human-computer interaction (the study of how people interact with computers), I tend to find slips especially funny. Slips happen a lot when people try to use computers. Anyone who's ever accidentally sent a naughty e-mail to their grandmother can relate.

When developing software, you can learn a lot from slips. If users are making silly mistakes (the digital equivalent of tossing an apple core into a laundry hamper), you can modify the software to make these mistakes less likely. So in addition to being funny, slips can also be a learning experience.

So why did I find it funny that I threw my garbage into my laundry hamper? It's not that I enjoy separating fruit waste from stinky laundry. It's probably because sometimes it's easy to laugh at your own mistakes. And it's even easier if no one's around to mock you. And it's especially easy if you're supposedly a guru in the area of cognitive psychology, but you make the same silly mistakes as everyone else.