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Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.
With the passage of time, the psychology of people stays the same, but the tools and objects in the world change. Cultures change. Technologies change. The principles of design still hold, but the way they get applied needs to be modified to account for new activities, new technologies, new methods of communication and interaction.
Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.
Industrial design: The professional service of creating and developing concepts and specifications that optimize the function, value, and appearance of products and systems for the mutual benefit of both user and manufacturer (from the Industrial Design Society of America’s website).
Interaction design: The focus is upon how people interact with technology. The goal is to enhance people’s understanding of what can be done, what is happening, and what has just occurred. Interaction design draws upon principles of psychology, design, art, and emotion to ensure a positive, enjoyable experience.
Experience design: The practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality and enjoyment of the total experience.
Design is concerned with how things work, how they are controlled, and the nature of the interaction between people and technology.
It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.
logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.
So we must design our machines on the assumption that people will make errors.
The solution is human-centered design (HCD), an approach that puts human needs, capabilities, and behavior first, then designs to accommodate those needs, capabilities, and ways of behaving.
Good design starts with an understanding of psychology and technology.
Good design requires good communication, especially from machine to person, indicating what actions are possible, what is hap...
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Designers need to focus their attention on the cases where things go wrong, not just on when things work as planned.
Experience is critical, for it determines how fondly people remember their interactions.
An affordance is a relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used.
The presence of an affordance is jointly determined by the qualities of the object and the abilities of the agent that is interacting. This relational definition of affordance gives considerable difficulty to many people. We are used to thinking that properties are associated with objects. But affordance is not a property. An affordance is a relationship. Whether an affordance exists depends upon the properties of both the object and the agent.
Affordances exist even if they are not visible. For designers, their visibility is critical: visible affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things.
Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where the action should take place.
Good design requires, among other things, good communication of the purpose, structure, and operation of the device to the people who use it.
Signifiers can be deliberate and intentional, such as the sign PUSH on a door, but they may also be accidental and unintentional, such as our use of the visible trail made by previous people walking through a field or over a snow-covered terrain to determine the best path. Or how we might use the presence or absence of people waiting at a train station to determine whether we have missed the train.
Affordances represent the possibilities in the world for how an agent (a person, animal, or machine) can interact with something.
Signifiers are signals. Some signifiers are signs, labels, and drawings placed in the world, such as the signs labeled “push,” “pull,” or “exit” on doors, or arrows and diagrams indicating what is to be acted upon or in which direction to gesture, or other instructions.
• Affordances are the possible interactions between people and the environment. Some affordances are perceivable, others are not. • Perceived affordances often act as signifiers, but they can be ambiguous. • Signifiers signal things, in particular what actions are possible and how they should be done. Signifiers must be perceivable, else they fail to function.
In design, signifiers are more important than affordances, for they communicate how to use the design. A signifier can be words, a graphical illustration, or just a device whose perceived affordances are unambiguous. Creative designers incorporate the signifying part of the design into a cohesive experience.
Feedback must be immediate: even a delay of a tenth of a second can be disconcerting.
Feedback must also be informative.
Poor feedback can be worse than no feedback at all, because it is distracting, uninformative, and in many cases irritating and anxiety-provoking.
Too much feedback can be even more annoying than too little.
Feedback is essential, but not when it gets in the way of other things, including a calm and relaxing environment.
A conceptual model is an explanation, usually highly simplified, of how something works.
Mental models, as the name implies, are the conceptual models in people’s minds that represent their understanding of how things work.
Conceptual models are valuable in providing understanding, in predicting how things will behave, and in figuring out what to do when things do not go as planned.
Good conceptual models are the key to understandable, enjoyable products: good communication is the key to good conceptual models.
The same technology that simplifies life by providing more functions in each device also complicates life by making the device harder to learn, harder to use. This is the paradox of technology and the challenge for the designer.
When people use something, they face two gulfs: the Gulf of Execution, where they try to figure out how it operates, and the Gulf of Evaluation, where they try to figure out what happened (Figure 2.1). The role of the designer is to help people bridge the two gulfs.
The Gulf of Evaluation reflects the amount of effort that the person must make to interpret the physical state of the device and to determine how well the expectations and intentions have been met. The gulf is small when the device provides information about its state in a form that is easy to get, is easy to interpret, and matches the way the person thinks about the system.
We bridge the Gulf of Execution through the use of signifiers, constraints, mappings, and a conceptual model. We bridge the Gulf of Evaluation through the use of feedback and a conceptual model.
Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt once pointed out, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” Levitt’s example of the drill implying that the goal is really a hole is only partially correct, however. When people go to a store to buy a drill, that is not their real goal. But why would anyone want a quarter-inch hole? Clearly that is an intermediate goal. Perhaps they wanted to hang shelves on the wall. Levitt stopped too soon. Once you realize that they don’t really want the drill, you realize that perhaps they don’t really want
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Because we are only aware of the reflective level of conscious processing, we tend to believe that all human thought is conscious. But it isn’t. We also tend to believe that thought can be separated from emotion. This is also false. Cognition and emotion cannot be separated. Cognitive thoughts lead to emotions: emotions drive cognitive thoughts. The brain is structured to act upon the world, and every action carries with it expectations, and these expectations drive emotions. That is why much of language is based on physical metaphors, why the body and its interaction with the environment are
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Cognition provides understanding: emotion provides value judgments. A human without a working emotional system has difficulty making choices. A human without a cognitive system is dysfunctional.
One valuable explanation of the levels of processing within the brain, applicable to both cognitive and emotional processing, is to think of three different levels of processing, each quite different from the other, but all working together in concert.
The most basic level of processing is called visceral. This is sometimes referred to as “the lizard brain.”
These are part of the basic protective mechanisms of the human affective system, making quick judgments about the environment: good or bad, safe or dangerous.
The basic biology of the visceral system minimizes its ability to learn. Visceral learning takes place primarily by sensitization or desensitization through such mechanisms as adaptation and classical conditioning. Visceral responses are fast and automatic. They give rise to the startle reflex for novel, unexpected events; for such genetically programmed behavior as fear of heights, dislike of the dark or very noisy environments, dislike of bitter tastes and the liking of sweet tastes, and so on.
It simply assesses the situation: no cause is assigned, no blame, and no credit.
The visceral level is tightly coupled to the body’s musculature— the motor system. This is what causes animals to fight or flee, or to relax. An animal’s (or person’s) visceral state can often be read by analyzing the tension of the body: tense means a negative state; relaxed, a positive state.
For designers, the visceral response is about immediate perception: the pleasantness of a mellow, harmonious sound or the jarring, irritating scratch of fingernails on a rough surface. Here is where the style matters: appearances, whether sound or sight, touch or smell, drive the visceral response.
This has nothing to do with how usable, effective, or understandable the product is. It is all about attraction or repulsion. Great designers use their aesthetic sensibilities to drive these visceral responses.
Visceral responses matter.
