Diving into: The Design of Everyday Things — #1
Author: Don Norman
Good design characteristics include:
1. Discoverability: Given a product , what are the possible set of actions, where and how to perform these possible actions.
2. Understanding: what does it mean to have a feature? What do all the controls and settings given a certain product, mean -when put together?
Discoverability comes from the application of five psychological concepts:
1. Affordances: The relationship between the user and the product determines how it can be used. An affordance merely dictates what actions are possible but not where/how to do these.
An example of an affordance is — a microwave can be turned on or off. The affordances may or may not be perceivable by the end-users and their senses.
“Gibsonian Psychology”, an ecological approach to “perception” paves way for thinking of the world as containing clues and people, namely “agents”, simply “directly” picked them up along the way through normal stimulus, responses to external events and communicators. This kind of information pick-up is done pre-cognition and these are very much associated with “affordances”.
2. Signifiers: A signifier is any perceivable indicator that communicates to the user the how and where of an action. A button and its label may signify that the microwave can be turned on/off. While the action itself is an affordance, the existence of the button with the label is a signifier.
3. Mappings: The relationship between actions, controls and the output is a mapping in the product design world. The related controls should ideally be grouped together and controls should be close to the action being performed.
The natural mappings may be different for different cultures. For example: the light switches in India, Australia, UK — down for off and up for on whereas in America — down for on and up for off. Some say it takes cue from the general oil and gas lights — which we turn up or turn down the flame to make the lights brighter or dimmer. So the design here followed, that you flip a switch up to make the lights brighter (turn them on), and down to make them dimmer (turn them off).
4. Feedback: Feedback is a way to let the end-user know a requested control’s action is being performed — that the product is working on your request. Take for example, the progress bar while filling an application is a design method included in the feedback mechanism.
Feedback should be ideally
— immediate: delays in feedback may raise cause concern for the end-user, and they may get agitated and stop using the product.
— informative: feedback should be easy to understand for all kinds of end-users.
— unobtrusive: too many or too less feedbacks can get in the way of using a basic functionality of a product. The other day, I was signing up for an app which took me 5 minutes because I had to swipe and read cute comments like “Almost there” , “would you like some suggestions” and further more — just to make it entertaining but it was annoying to just reach the end of the sign-up process itself.
— prioritised: feedbacks must be in order and methodical enough for the user to understand. To re-iterate this — Just imagine a fire alarm which lights up first and makes the alarming beep sound after ten minutes.
5. Conceptual Model: The conceptual model of a product is the user’s understanding of how the product works. These models are very much created in our brains while using the products day in and day out, remembering the relationship between controls, actions, the functions and end results. These mental models are created via actual usage of the product, reading the user manual and FAQs, combining to form a system image.
A designer’s intended mental conceptual model and a user’s mental conceptual model can be radically different. The aim of good design is to bridge this gap.