The Seven-Stage Design Audit
Use the The Seven Stages of Action as a checklist. A user should always be able to answer all seven questions; the burden is on the designer to supply the information at each stage.
| Stage | Question the user asks |
|---|---|
| Goal | 1. What do I want to accomplish? |
| Plan | 2. What are the alternative action sequences? |
| Specify | 3. What action can I do now? |
| Perform | 4. How do I do it? |
| Perceive | 5. What happened? |
| Interpret | 6. What does it mean? |
| Compare | 7. Is this okay? Have I accomplished my goal? |
How to answer each
- Questions 1–4 (execution / doing) are answered by feedforward: appropriate Signifiers, constraints, mappings, and the conceptual model.
- Questions 5–7 (evaluation) are answered by feedback: explicit information about the impact of the action, plus the conceptual model. See Feedback and Feedforward.
Diagnostic use
When something is hard to use, ask: at which of the seven stages does it fail? which design principle is deficient? Then improve there.
Norman's self-imposed rule: "Don't criticize unless you can do better." Bad results often come from poor communication among the many people who built the system (designer, contractor, plumber for a shower), not a single villain — design is a whole-system problem.
Confidence
1.0 — explicit checklist.
Sources: ["DOET ch.2 'Seven Stages of Action: Seven Fundamental Design Principles' p.71-73 (Fig 2.7)"]