HCI

1. Norman’s Seven Stages of
Action
A different look

2. What are Seven stages of action
• Norman's Seven Stages of Action, also known as Norman's Action Cycle,
• is a conceptual framework proposed by Donald Norman that describes the
sequence of steps involved in human interaction with technology.
1. Goal: What result do I want to achieve?
2. Plan: What options do I have for achieving my goal?
3. Specify: Which of these options will I choose?
4. Perform: How do I execute my plan?
5. Perceive: What happened when I did that?
6. Interpret: What does that result mean?
7. Compare: Did I reach my goal?
•

3. Perceiving system state
• Perceiving the system's state:
• involves the user's observation of the system's response to their actions.
• refers to the user perceiving the changes, feedback, or information
provided by the system in response to their inputs.
• includes visual cues, auditory feedback, haptic feedback, or any other form
of system response that the user can perceive through their senses.
• Example:
• In an email application, perceiving the system's state includes the user
seeing new email notifications, the display of an email preview, or hearing
a notification sound when a new email arrives.

4. Interpreting system’s state
• focuses on the user's mental processing and understanding of the system's
response.
• involves interpreting the perceived information, making sense of it, and
evaluating its meaning in the context of the user's goals and expectations.
• requires cognitive processing, pattern recognition, and comprehension of the
feedback provided by the system.
• Example:
• After perceiving the email notification and preview in the email application,
interpreting the system's state would involve the user understanding that they
have received a new email, quickly glancing at the sender and subject, and
determining whether it requires immediate attention or can be dealt with later.

5. 7 stages of action

6. Execution

7. Evaluation

8. Example
• Imagine you are alone at home and bored and you want to kill your
boredom, So you go and watch a movie. This looks simple but your brain as
executed this in following way
• Forming the goal: want to kill your boredom
• Forming the intention (Plan) : watching movie seems to be good idea
• Specifying the action: You check or nearest theatre and check time
• Executing the action: Purchase ticket and sit in the examination Hall
• Perceiving the system's state: Watch audio , video effects of movie
• Interpreting the system's state: Interpret effects to your understanding
• Evaluating the outcome: After movie, was it good time pass

9. Advantages of Norman’s Seven stages of
action Framework
• Structured Approach
• User Centerd Design
• Error prevention and Recovery
• Evaluation and iteration

10. Gulf of Execution & Gulf of Execution
• There is a Gulf of Execution where we tend to discover the object’s
properties
• and Gulf of Evaluation where we get feedback related to our
interaction.
• Before interacting with an object that we didn’t see before, in our
mind we form a conceptual model.
• The more human being’s conceptual model is closer to the
functioning model of the object, the interaction is more pleasant and
efficient.

11. Gulf of Evaluation

12. Example 2- Student Management System
Interface
•.Apply Norman 7 stages of action on
given web application

13. Evaluating Behavior With the Seven Stages
of Action
• When we interact with a new object, we have two problems to solve: “How do I
use this?” and “Did that work?”
• Author Don Norman calls these “the gulf of execution” (“How do I use this?”)
and “the gulf of evaluation.” (“Did that work?”)
• The Gulf of Execution refers to the process of figuring out what an object does
and how to use it. This can happen either before using the object or while trying
it out.
• Affordances, signifiers, and mapping are tools designers use to help users bridge
this gulf.
• The Gulf of Evaluation occurs after using an object and refers to the process of
evaluating what the device did and whether that action matched our goals.
• Feedback and accurate mental models are the most helpful tools for bridging this
gulf.

14. Gulf of Execution---
• if a person only wants to record a movie currently being shown with her
VCR, she imagines that it requires hitting a 'record' button.
• But if the necessary action sequence involves specifying the time of
recording and selection of a channel there is a gulf of execution
• : A gap between the psychological language (or mental model) of the user's goals
and the very physical action-object language of the controls of the VCR via which it is
operated.
• In the language of the user, the goal of recording the current movie can be
achieved by the action sequence "Hit the record button,"
• but in the language of the VCR the correct action sequence is:
• 1) Hit the record button.
2) Specify time of recording via the controls X, Y, and Z.
3) Select channel via the channel-up-down control.
4) Press the OK button.

15. Gulf of Execution---
• a person can look at a light switch and easily tell how to operate the
switch. This means that the gulf of execution is small. Norman states
that, in order to design the best interfaces, the gulf must be kept as
small as possible.
• For example, a person might think that because he has pressed a
button on a remote control that the TV will turn off. But if the remote
control does not work because of technical problems with the TV
itself, there is still a gulf of execution. Conversely, if pressing the
button on the remote control were enough to turn off the TV without
any other steps being required on behalf of the user (for example,
waiting for several seconds), then there would be no gulf of
execution.

16. Gulf of Evaluation
• it the difficulty of assessing the state of the system and how well the
artifact supports the discovery and interpretation of that state (Norman
1991).
• "The gulf is small when the system provides information about its state in a
form that is easy to get, is easy to interpret, and matches the way the
person thinks of the system“
• if the system does not "present itself" in a way that lets the user derive
which sequence of actions will lead to the intended goal or system state, or
derive whether previous actions have moved the user closer to her goal,
there is a large gulf of evaluation.
• In this case, the person must exert a considerable amount of effort and expend
significant attentional resources to interpret the state of the system and derive how
well her expectations have been met.

17. Gulf of Evaluation
• is the degree of ease with which a user can perceive and interpret
whether or not the action they performed was successful.
• This gulf is small when the system provides information about its
state in a form that is easy to receive, interpret, and matches the way
the person thinks of the system.

18. Gulf of Evaluation Examples
• In the VCR example , the design of the controls of the VCR should be
easily interpretable (e.g. when recording, the 'record' control should
signal that it is activated or a display should).
• You look at the fan and you can immediately tell that either the fan is
on or off. Hence gulf of evaluation in this case is small.

19. gulf of evaluation
• you click on a link on a website.
• On doing that, it shows a page stating "Loading....“
• This doesn't give clarity on what’s happening – is the website going
to load, will it not load, what is the current state of launching the
website.
• You cannot determine how much time you have to wait before you
can find out if the page is loaded or not.
• In this case the gulf of evaluation is high.

20. Example: Copying a large number of files
 Large gulf of evaluation: hourglass, spinning
pinwheel, no details
 Small gulf of evaluation: progress bar with
listing of current file being copied, and
estimated completion time

21. How to bridge gulf of execution
• make functions discoverable (ideally, they should be)
• Discoverability, is the degree of ease with which the user can find all the
elements and features of a new system when they first encounter it.
• let the users do whatever they wish to
• maintain consistency with other tools
• understand and know your users, of every type of expertise — from
novice to expert
• feed-forward, tell the users what might happen.

22. How to bridge gulf of evaluation
• The system should give constant feedback to the user.
• The feedback should be given immediately or with the minimum
delay possible
• The feedback should match the user’s actions
• The feedback should vary accordingly