Review

This book has changed how I see the world. I’ve always been interested, amused and sometimes annoyed by bad design. Now I see it everywhere.

By focusing on the very fundamentals of design – I’ve found this book to be consistently and endlessly applicable to work and life.

The concept of affordances progressed my understanding of accessibility. Thinking about conceptual models helps me grapple with product messaging. Learning about feedback has left me dumbfounded that the button to call my elevator proudly sounds before the press has actually been registered. You have to push a little harder to actually call the lift 🤯

Developing a shared vocabulary – to talk about these concepts with my colleagues in design has helped accelerate day to day product conversations.

Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• Norman doors (named after the author) are doors that don’t open the way you expect.
• Affordance: A capability made possible by the relationship between the human and the object.
• Signifier: Anything that communicates the purpose, structure or operation of a device to a user
• Mapping: How controls and displays map back to actions and intended results
• Feedback: How the system lets you know a request is being worked on, or is complete
• Conceptual models: A simplified understanding of how something works
• The Technology Paradox: Technology has potential to make life easier and more enjoyable. At the same time it risks adding complexity, increasing difficulty and frustrating the user.
• The Design Challenge: Different disciplines (engineering, marketing, operations) often have different priorities (scalability, reliability, price, differentiation, production). The design challenge is to bring everyone together, to build a product that customers love.
• 7 Stages of action:
  • Form the goal
  • Plan the action
  • Specify an action sequence
  • Perform the action sequence
  • Perceive the state of the world
  • Interpret the perception
  • Compare the outcome with the goal
• 7 Fundamental design principles
  1. Discoverability. Determining what actions are possible and the current state
  2. Feedback. Full & continuous info about the current state. Particularly after actions.
  3. Conceptual models. Invoke a model of the system that enhances discoverability and evaluation
  4. Affordances. The proper affordances exist to make the desired actions possible
  5. Signifiers. Ensure affordances are perceived, increasing discoverability & evaluation
  6. Mappings. Make the relationship between controls and actions predictable
  7. Constraints. Trim possible actions, to ease interpretation. Physical, logical, semantic & cultural.
• Usability is often not prioritized in the purchasing process especially when the purchaser ≠ user.
• 4 Classes of Constraints:
  • Physical limitations to the possible operations.
  • Cultural. Cultures have a set of allowable actions
  • Semantic: Only certain combinations make sense.
  • Logical constraint. There is a logical relationship between the spatial or functional layout of components and the things that they affect. E.g If take something apart, put it back together again, and there’s a part left on the table. You know you’ve made a mistake.

A forcing function	a physical constraint such that failure at one stage, prevents the next step from happening
Interlocks	Forces operations to take place in proper sequence. Example: Washing machine door doesn’t open unless its drained water
Lock-ins	Keeps an operation active, preventing someone from prematurely stopping it. Example: Warning that makes it hard to leave an unsaved word document
Lock-outs	A lockout prevents someone from entering a space that is dangerous, or prevents an event from occurring. Example: The pin in a fire extinguisher that prevents accidental discharge

• The Forcing Function Tradeoff: Make it too annoying and people will try to disable it. So minimize the nuisance value whilst retaining the safety feature.
• Consistency in design is virtuous. People are great at transfer learning (lessons learned with one system transfer readily to others). On the whole, consistency is to be followed.
• Skeuomorphic: incorporating old familiar ideas into new technologies, even though they no longer play a functional role.
• Key Design Principles
  • Put information in the environment → Reduce the burden of needing endogenous knowledge.
  • Allow for efficient operations when people have learned the requirements
  • Use environmental knowledge to make it easier for non-experts. This will help infrequent journeys and infrequent users
  • Leverage natural and artificial constraints: physical, logical, semantic and cultural.
  • Exploit the power of forcing functions and natural mappings
  • Bridge the gulf of execution and the gulf of evaluation.
  • Make things visible, both for executions and evaluation
  • One the execution side, provide the feed forward information: make the options readily available.
  • On the evaluation side: make the results of each action apparent.
  • Make it possible to determine the system’s status readily, easily, accurately and in a form consistent with the person’s goals, plans, and expectations.
  • Embrace errors. Seek to understand their causes and ensure they don’t happen again. Re-design don’t reprimand
• Depth and Breadth Research Tradeoff. Design research is deep insight on a small number of people, Market research is shallow insight on a large number of people.
• There is no such thing as the average person
• Complexity is OK. Confusion is bad.
• Design is successful only if the product is successful (purchased, used and enjoyed). Design should pay attention to the total experience and the total lifecycle. Design should be concerned with function, usability and understandability.