CONCEPT
Seven Stages of Action
Norman's decomposition of goal-directed behavior into seven discrete stages — from forming a goal to evaluating the outcome — the cognitive architecture that locates the two gulfs and reveals how AI compresses the user's role from seven stages to three.
The Seven Stages of Action model describes the sequence through which a person moves from wanting something to knowing whether she got it. The stages are: form a goal, form an intention, specify an action, execute the action, perceive the system state, interpret the state, and evaluate the outcome. The Gulf of Execution spans stages two through four; the Gulf of Evaluation spans stages five through seven. The AI era has compressed this architecture asymmetrically — absorbing the execution stages into the machine while leaving the evaluation stages to the human, now lacking the comprehension that execution work used to provide.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The seven-stage model gave Norman's two gulfs their precise location within human cognition. Stages two through four — where the person translates intention into action — constitute the entire Gulf of Execution. Stages five through seven — where the person