Cognitive Artifacts & Windows 95

Title	Cognitive Artifacts & Windows 95
# of Words	805
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	3.22

Cognitive Artifacts & Windows 95

Cognitive Artifacts & Windows 95

     The article on Cognitive Artifacts by David A. Norman deals with the
theories and principles of artifacts as they relate to the user during execution
and completion of tasks. These principles and theories that Norman speaks about
may be applied to any graphical user interface, however I have chosen to relate
the article to the interface known as Windows 95. Within Windows 95, Microsoft
has included a little tool called the wizard that guides us through the steps
involved in setting up certain applications.  This wizard is a very helpful tool
to the non experienced computer user, in the way that it acts like a to-do list.
The wizard takes a complex task and breaks it into discrete pieces by asking
questions and responding to those questions based on the answers.  Using
Norman's theories on system view and the personal view of artifacts, we see that
the system views the wizard as an enhancement.  For example, we wanted to set up
the Internet explorer, you click on the icon answer the wizard's questions and
the computer performs the work.  Making sure everything is setup properly
without the errors that could occur in configuring the task yourself.  The
wizard performs all the functions on its little to-do list without having  the
user worrying about whether he/she remembered to include all the commands.  On
the side of personal views the user may see the wizard as a new task to learn
but in general it is simpler than having to configure the application yourself
and making an error, that could cause disaster to your system.  The wizard also
prevents the user from having to deal with all the internal representation of
the application like typing in command lines in the system editor.
     Within Windows 95 most of the representation is internal therefore we
need a way to transform it to surface representation so it is accessible to the
user.  According to Norman's article there are "three essential ingredients in
representational systems.  These being the world which is to be represented, the
set of symbols representing the world, and an interpreter."   This is done in
Windows by icons on the desktop and on the start menu.  The world we are trying
to represent to the user is the application, which can be represented by a
symbol which is the icon.  These icons on the desktop and on the start menu are
the surface representations the user sees when he goes to access the application
not all the files used to create it ...

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