Book: The Design of Everyday Things
Author: Don Norman
Find Online:https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/design-everyday-things
Date Read: In progress
This is one of those books that's considered a classic in design circles, so I felt obligated to check it out. The closest I came to finishing it was last year when it was part of a now defunct work bookclub. I'll eventually get around to finishing it 🤷🏽♀️
Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.
All artificial things are designed.
Design is concerned with how things work, how they are controlled, and the nature of the interaction between people and technology.
Human-centered design is a design philosophy (and a set of procedures). It means starting with a good understanding of people and the needs that the design is intended to meet. This understanding comes about primarily through observation, for people themselves are often unaware of their true needs, even unaware the difficulties they are encountering.
Experience is critical, for it determines how fondly people remember their interactions.
Discoverability: Discovering what a product does, how it works, and what operations are possible.
Discoverability results from the application of five (technically six) fundamental psychological concepts:
affordances
signifiers
constraints
mappings
Feedback
the conceptual model of the system
Affordance: The relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used.
The relationship between a physical object and a person (or for that matter, any interaction agent, whether animal or human, or even machines and robots).
For designers, [the visibility of affordances] is critical: visible affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things.
Signifiers: Any mark or sound, any perceivable indicator that communicates appropriate behavior to a person. They are the signaling component of affordances. They help people figure out what actions are possible without the need for labels or instructions.
Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where the action should take place.
It doesn’t matter whether the useful signal was deliberately placed or whether is it incidental: there is no necessary distinction. Why should it matter whether a flag was placed as a deliberate clue to wind direction or was there as an advertisement or symbol in one’s country? Once I interpret a flag’s motion to indicate wind direction, it does not matter why it was placed there.
Mapping is a technical term, borrowed from mathematics, meaning the relationship between the elements of two sets of things.
It doesn’t matter whether these conceptual models are accurate: what matters is that they provide a clear way of remembering and understanding the mappings.
Some natural mappings are cultural or biological, as in the universal standard that moving the hadn’t up signifies more, moving it down signifies less, which is why it is appropriate to use vertical position to represent intensity or amount. Other natural mappings follow from the principles of perception and allow for the natural grouping or patterning of controls and feedback.
Feedback: Communicating the results of an action. It must be:
immediate
informative
planned
Conceptual model: an explanation, usually highly simplified, of how something works. These simplified models are valuable only as long as the assumptions that support them hold true. There are often multiple conceptual models of a product or device. a.k.a. mental models
Mental models: The conceptual models in people’s minds that represent their understanding of how things work.
A good conceptual model helps us predict the effects of our actions. Without a good model, we operate by rote, blindly; we do operations as we were told to do them; we can’t fully appreciate why, what effects to expect, or what to do if things go wrong.
The same technology that simplifies life by providing more functions in each device also complicates life by making the devices harder to learn, harder to use. This is the paradox of technology and the challenge for the designer.