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This is a starter kit for good design. It is intended to be enjoyable and informative for everyone: everyday people, technical people, designers, and nondesigners.
One goal is to turn readers into great observers of the absurd, of the poor design that gives rise to so many of the problems of modern life, especially of modern technology.
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.
Why? Because we are all designers in the sense that all of us deliberately design our lives, our rooms, and the way we do things. We can also design workarounds, ways of overcoming the flaws of existing devices. So, one purpose of this book is to give back your control over the products in your life: to know how to select usable and understandable ones, to
know how to fix those that aren’t so usable or understandable.
Human-centered design (HCD) has emerged since the first edition, partially inspired by that book. This current edition has an entire chapter devoted to the HCD process of product development.
also now know which parts were difficult and therefore need better explanations. In the interim, I also wrote many articles and six books on related topics, some of which I thought important to include in the revision.
Finally, one important component of the original edition was its brevity.
introduction. I kept that feature unchanged. I tried to delete as much as I added to keep the total size about the same
My problems with doors have become so well known that confusing doors are often called “Norman doors.”
FIGURE 1.1. Coffeepot for Masochists. The French artist Jacques Carelman in his series of books Catalogue d’objets introuvables (Catalog of unfindable objects) provides delightful examples of everyday things that are deliberately unworkable, outrageous, or otherwise ill-formed.
My friend pushed on one of the outer doors. It swung inward, and he entered the building. Then, before he could get to the next row of doors, he was distracted and turned around for an instant. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he had moved slightly to the right. So when he came to the next door and pushed it, nothing happened.
If you push on the hinge side, nothing happens. In my friend’s case, he was in a building where the designer aimed for beauty, not utility. No distracting lines, no visible pillars, no visible hinges. So how can the ordinary user know which side to push on? While distracted, my friend had moved toward the (invisible) supporting pillar, so he was pushing the doors on the hinged side. No wonder nothing happened. Attractive doors. Stylish. Probably won a design prize.
Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding. Discoverability: Is it possible to even figure out what actions are possible and where and how to perform them? Understanding: What does it all mean? How is the product supposed to be used? What do all the different controls and settings mean?
In England I visited a home with a fancy new Italian washer-dryer combination, with super-duper multisymbol controls, all to
do everything anyone could imagine doing with the washing and drying of clothes. The husband (an engineering psychologist) said he refused to go near it. The wife (a physician) said she had simply memorized one setting and tried to ignore the rest. I asked to see the manual: it was just as confusing as the device. The whole purpose of the design is lost.
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.
The problem with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.
took a long time for me to realize that my understanding of human behavior was relevant to my interest in the design of technology. As I watched people struggle with technology, it became clear that the difficulties were caused by the technology, not the people.
control rooms were so poorly designed that error was inevitable: design was at fault, not the operators. The moral was simple: we were designing things for people, so we needed to understand both technology and people. But that’s a difficult step for many engineers: machines are so logical, so orderly. If we didn’t have people, everything would work so much better. Yup, that’s how I used to think.
The term affordance refers to the relationship between a physical object and a person (or for that matter, any interacting agent, whether animal or human, or even machines and robots).
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.
A chair affords (“is for”) support and, therefore,...
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Most chairs can also be carried by a single person (they afford lifting), but...
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If young or relatively weak people cannot lift a chair, then for these people, the chair does not have that afford...
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Glass affords transparency.
If an affordance or anti-affordance cannot be perceived, some means of signaling its presence is required: I call this property a signifier (discussed in the next section).
He started off as a Gestalt psychologist, but then developed an approach that is today named after him: Gibsonian psychology, an ecological approach to perception.
He pointed out that all the senses work together, that we pick up information about the world by the combined result of all of them.
“Information pickup” was one of his favorite phrases, and Gibson believed that the combined information picked up by all of our sensory apparatus—
Affordances exist even if they are not visible. For designers, their visibility is critical: visible affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things.
A flat plate mounted on a door affords pushing.
Knobs afford turning, pushing, and pulling. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls ar...
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I call the signaling component of affordances signifiers.
design community loved the concept and affordances soon propagated into the instruction and writing about design. I soon found mention of the term everywhere. Alas, the term became used in ways that had nothing to do with the original.
Many people find affordances difficult to understand because they are relationships, not properties. Designers deal with fixed properties, so there is a temptation to say that the property is an affordance. But that is not the only problem with the concept of affordances.
Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where the action should take place. We need both.
why should I have to put my clean hands back into the dirty water to empty the sink? The problem here is not just the lack of signifier, it is the faulty decision to produce a stopper that requires people to dirty their clean hands to use it. (Photographs by the author.)
My favorite example of a misleading signifier is a row of vertical pipes across a service road that I once saw in a public park. The pipes obviously blocked cars and trucks from driving on that road: they were good examples of anti-affordances. But to my great surprise, I saw a park vehicle simply go through the pipes. Huh? I walked over and examined them: the pipes were made of rubber, so vehicles could simply drive right over them. A very clever signifier, signaling a blocked road (via an apparent anti-affordance) to the average person, but permitting passage for those who knew.
Affordances are the possible interactions between people and the environment. Some affordances are perceivable, others are not.
FIGURE 1.7. Good Mapping: Automobile Seat Adjustment Control. This is an excellent example of natural mapping. The control is in the shape of the seat itself: the mapping is straightforward. To move the front edge of the seat higher, lift up on the front part of the button. To make the seat back recline, move the button back. The same principle could be applied to much more common objects. This particular control is from Mercedes-Benz, but this form of mapping is now used by many automobile companies. (Photograph by the author.) Note that there are many mappings that feel “natural” but in
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Ever watch people at an elevator repeatedly push the Up button, or repeatedly push the pedestrian button at a street crossing? Ever drive to a traffic intersection and wait an inordinate amount of time for the signals
to change, wondering all the time whether the detection circuits noticed your vehicle (a common problem with bicycles)? What is missing in all these cases is feedback: some way of letting you know that the system is working on your request.
Feedback—communicating the results of an action—is a well-known concept from the science of control and information theory. Imagine trying to hit a target with a ball when you cannot see the target. Even as simple a task as picking up a glass with the hand requires feedback to aim the hand properly, to grasp the glass, and to lift it. A misplaced hand will ...
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The human nervous system is equipped with numerous feedback mechanisms, including visual, auditory, and touch sensors, as well as vestibular and proprioceptive systems that monitor body position and muscle and limb movements. Given the im...
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Feedback must be immediate: even a delay of a tenth of a second can be disconcerting. If th...
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often give up, going off to do othe...
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Too much feedback can be even more annoying than too little. My dishwasher likes to beep at three a.m. to tell me that the wash is done, defeating my goal of having it work
Poor design of feedback can be the result of decisions aimed at reducing costs, even if they make life more difficult for people. Rather than use multiple signal lights, informative displays, or rich, musical sounds
