Seven Stages of Action

Norman's model of how people act: form a goal, then plan, specify, and perform actions (execution), then perceive, interpret, and compare the result against the goal (evaluation). Most of these stages happen subconsciously.

Why it Matters

Breaking action into stages shows exactly where a design must support the user and maps each stage to a design principle. Each stage is a place a design can help or fail.

Signals

• A task stalls at a specific stage: no clear path to a goal, no obvious action to take, or no readable result to interpret.

Benefits

A checklist for design: support every stage, especially the gulfs between intention and action and between result and understanding.

Risks

Treating it as a rigid linear script; real action loops back, skips stages, and runs many cycles at once.

Tensions

A clean linear telling versus the messy, opportunistic reality of how people actually behave.

Examples

Turning on a lamp runs the whole cycle in an instant; a complex form may stall at "specify" because the required input is unclear.