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Kindle Notes & Highlights
To understand products, it is not enough to understand design or technology: it is critical to understand business.
Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.
design presents a fascinating interplay of technology and psychology, that the designers must understand both.
Discoverability results from appropriate application of five fundamental psychological concepts covered in the next few chapters: affordances, signifiers, constraints, mappings, and feedback. But there is a sixth principle, perhaps most important of all: the conceptual model of the system.
Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where the action should take place.
The hard part is to convince people to understand the viewpoints of the others, to abandon their disciplinary viewpoint and to think of the design from the viewpoints of the person who buys the product and those who use it, often different people.
It is when the disciplines operate independently of one another that major clashes and deficiencies occur.
Cognition provides understanding: emotion provides value judgments.
