In 1986, Don Norman published a book called The Psychology of Everyday Things. It was later re-released under the title The Design of Everyday Things. But this book has had an enormous influence on the field of user experience, and many user experience professionals have read it, and use the concepts in this book on a regular basis. One of the things that Norman covers in this book is a model of how people act when they're acting in the world to pursue goals that they have. This model is called the seven stages of action. It starts with the user or the person forming a goal, so forming a goal about something that they want to accomplish. Then, proceeds to forming a specific intention to act towards pursuing that goal. Given that intention, the user or the individual then selects an action of the set of actions that are possible in the environment where they are currently located, and then proceeds to execute the action. In executing the action, the person changes the world or changes the environment in some way to hopefully move them closer to their goal. So, the next step is actually to perceive the change that they've made in the world or to perceive the world as it is now after their action and interpret the state of the world. To try to figure out, did they actually succeed in moving closer towards their goal? Or did their action not get them closer to their goal? In either case, they would then update their goal either moving onto the next step, the next goal that they want to accomplish or forming a new goal that would help them do what they need to do. When Norman wrote about the seven stages of action, he talked about acting in the world, and making changes to the world, and perceiving the state of the world. But of course, everything that he wrote about applies to interactions with systems that were designed by people. So, for example, it applies just as well to interacting with, let's say, an espresso machine where the goal is to get a cup of espresso, and the user has to form intentions, and select actions that will result in producing a cup of espresso that they want to drink. It also applies to software systems like this example of the Amazon web page where the goal might be to find a book and purchase it or something along those lines. So, let's look at an example of how these seven stages would work in a simple case. So, let's say, I have the goal that I want to get out of my office and go down the hall to get a cup of coffee. So, my larger goal is to get a cup of coffee. But my immediate goal of course, is to get out of my office, you will know the door is closed. So, looking at the environment, I am would form the intention of opening the door, so that I could get out of my office and go on to the next step. Sizing up the different possibilities, my next step would be to select the action, which in this case would be to grab the door handle, and turn it, so that I can open it. Of course, then, I would execute the action, opening the door handle, and pulling the door to open it. I can now assess the state of the world after having pulled the door open, and I can see that the door is open, that the new state of the world is that I now have a path in front of me where I can exit the office, and I can evaluate the outcome to say, I was successful in moving closer to my goal of getting down the hall and getting a cup of coffee. Now, let's look at another example and think about how we would apply the seven stages of action to interacting with a website. So, my son's birthday is coming up and I know he likes Harry Potter. So, let's say, my goal is to buy a book for him or the most recent Harry Potter book that's just come out. So, my goal is to buy a book for him, but my more immediate goal of course, is to find the book, so that I can add it to my cart and do all the other stuff. So, my intention then is to define the book and I'm going to do that by searching. So, I'm selecting the action of searching. There's other ways that I could potentially go about it, but I'm going to select that and now, I'm going to execute that action by typing Harry Potter into the search box. I'm going to look down here and I recognize this book here, The Cursed Child, as the book that I'm looking for, so I can perceive the state of the world, I see the search results, and interpret it to evaluate the outcome that I have moved closer to my goal. I've successfully completed a search, is returned the book that I'm looking for, so I know I'm moving along in the right direction. So, I can now form a new goal, which is to look at this book, and put it into my shopping cart. So, again, I'll form the intention of getting more details and getting to a point where I can add this to my cart. Selecting the action, in this case, I will select the action of clicking on the icon, and I will execute the action, and now I perceive the state of the world, I see that I've got a page that's giving me more details about this book, and it has the option to add this to my cart. So, I can interpret that as bringing me closer to my goal, evaluating the outcome that I was successful, and I could go on from there, add it to my cart, and so on, and so forth. So, the seven stages of action repeat each other in the course of pursuing a larger goal all along the way, I'm updating my immediate goal of what it is that I want to do next, forming the intention to act, selecting, and executing the actions, and then perceiving the results of my actions to determine whether or not I'm getting closer to my goal. So, using these seven stages of action, we can take users interactions with a system that we designed and break them down into smaller steps that make it easier to see where problems might be occurring. By doing that, we can get better insight into what we need to do to fix those problems, so they won't occur in the future.
