Don is a man that needs no introduction. He is legend. See for yourself.
Book Review #14
Review
What is user-oriented design, why does it matter, and how do we design user-friendly products? Don sets out to answer these questions in The Design of Everyday Things, a comprehensive guide to the fundamentals of product design.
Through The Design of Everyday Things, we learn that the user should come first, despite that product design often neglects the user. We learn that we can leverage common consumer knowledge to effectively create simple mappings from features to their functions. We realize the importance of signifiers, constraints, effective system imaging, and prompt feedback in good product design. And we discover that it is not users whom we should demand more of. Instead of blaming ourselves for making mistakes when using products, we ought to blame the designers.
Are we really surprised that a user would pull the handle of the door on the left or that a user may push the wrong side of the door on the right? Too often products are designed without consideration of how someone in the real world would use them.
The book is broken down into 7 chapters, through which Don lays out the fundamentals. There are dozens of examples and elaborate models detailed for each of these concepts, but I won’t do them justice here. Instead, I will try to just hit the high spots.
The first is the idea of affordance. An affordance is the relationship between the user and the object: how it can be used by the user. A chair affords support and therefore affords sitting for those whose weight are within spec of the chair.
Signifiers are what draw the user toward its affordances. The four legs of a chair and its back wall signifies to user of how to sit. A pair of scissors with one small hole and one large hole with blades signify to users where the thumb, rest of hand, and material to be cut should be placed for the affordance of cutting.
Constraints limit users in a way that helps with proper use of the product. The back of the chair and the size of the scissor handle hole are both constraints. Another is well-designed children’s toys, such as legos. When it comes to design, constraints are good. After all, the most user-friendly devices are the ones that let themselves be used only the correct way.
There’s the conceptual model, the mental model that users develop about a product. The mental model for scissors is that its sharp blades will close in on itself and slice up paper as we close our hands on its handles. If scissors weren’t so mechanically simple to understand, and the blades instead moved in seemingly random directions as we closed our hands in on the handle, our mental model would be inaccurate, and we would have a very difficult time using the scissors for its intended purpose. With the advent of digital technology, this scenario is all too common.
To help build a more accurate mental model for users of more complex products, Don emphasizes the importance of managing the system image and creating effective mappings. Users cannot talk to the designers themselves, so they rely on the system image, which is a combination of the way the product looks, knowledge of similar products in the past, product feedback, and the information available to the user in the form of advertisement, labeling, and so forth.
Effective mapping contributes to a coherent system image by leveraging standard knowledge and applying it to this particular product. For example, a music player control panel has a button for each of these functions: volume up, volume down, play/pause (since only one of these can activate at a time), skip and previous. This is more sensible than having just one button that users then have to press 1-8x or more to activate particular features, in no meaningful fashion. That would be an example of poor mapping (and yet, digital watches to succumb to this poor design all the time).
Then there’s knowledge in the world vs. knowledge in the head. Knowledge in the head risks cognitive leaking, rendering a product unusable if the user happens to forget instructions to a product. Labels on the product protect against this by transferring knowledge from the head to knowledge in the world.
(Of course, there’s the argument about aesthetic design– and how a more aesthetic design leads to a more viscerally pleasing product and in turn that provides a user who is more creative in their problem solving as well as an interaction experience that is more pleasant on the whole. That’s further analysis for another day, though. If you’re really interested, check out this talk. It’s a fun watch.)
Reading this gem gave me a whole new appreciation for well-designed products as well as a more critical eye toward poorly designed ones.
While the framework is solid, I feel like we could argue that ease of use is underappreciated and may not be godly quality above all dictating market share that many claim it to be. There are plenty of reasons a product may suffer from poor usability. Beauty, brand, cost, and innovation are all qualities that may be valued more than usability. I like that Don touches on this in the ted talk included above.
I mean, a well-designed product is hardly noticed, appreciated only in reflection, and rarely garners the fame of, say, an innovative, aesthetic, and well-branded product. I fight with my google pixel 2 daily, and yet I love its image recognition technology, which far surpasses its competitors.
*Shrug* I guess it’s good for, and perhaps expected of- good incremental product development. For example, poor usability is definitely a vulnerability if two technologies are otherwise similar.
Rating: 8/10
nkimberly 