Cognitive Artifacts & Windows 95 :: essays research papers

Cognitive Artifacts & Windows 95     The article on Cognitive Artifacts by David A. Norman deals with thetheories and principles of artifacts as they relate to the drug user during executionand completion of tasks. These principles and theories that Norman speaks aboutmay be applied to any graphical user interface, however I have chosen to relatethe article to the interface known as Windows 95. Within Windows 95, Microsofthas included a little tool c in alled the wizard that guides us with the stepsinvolved in setting up certain applications. This wizard is a very helpful toolto the non experienced computer user, in the office that it acts like a to-do list.The wizard takes a complex task and breaks it into discrete pieces by askingquestions and responding to those questions based on the rejoinders. UsingNormans theories on dodge view and the personal view of artifacts, we see thatthe system views the wizard as an enhancement. For example, we wanted to se t upthe Internet explorer, you click on the icon answer the wizards questions andthe computer performs the work. Making sure everything is setup properlywithout the errors that could occur in configuring the task yourself. Thewizard performs all the functions on its little to-do list without having theuser worrying about whether he/she remembered to include all the commands. Onthe side of personal views the user may see the wizard as a freshly task to learnbut in general it is simpler than having to configure the application yourselfand making an error, that could cause disaster to your system. The wizard alsoprevents the user from having to deal with all the internal representation ofthe application like typing in command lines in the system editor.     Within Windows 95 most of the representation is internal whence weneed a way to transform it to come to the fore representation so it is accessible to theuser. According to Normans article there are "three essential ingredients inrepresentational systems. These being the world which is to be represented, theset of symbols representing the world, and an interpreter." This is done inWindows by icons on the desktop and on the start menu. The world we are arduousto represent to the user is the application, which can be represented by asymbol which is the icon. These icons on the desktop and on the start menu arethe surface representations the user sees when he goes to access the applicationnot all the files used to create it or used in conjunction with the applications