Don Norman and the design of everyday things
7 rules that help to reduce errors and make the user experience more intuitive.
There is a great Seth Godin talk “This is Broken” where he highlights examples of poor design that we live with every day.
Intuitively we all know when something is broken, things that just don’t work and cause frustrations when you use or experience them.
Don Norman is the doyen of good design and his 7 design principles are reference cornerstone. He outlines them in the seminal book “Design of Every day Things” (Good summary of the book by Zhiyang.)
The UX Design Blog
Design principles are aimed at helping designers find ways to enhance usability, influence perception, increase appeal, teach users, and make sound design decisions during projects.
Design principles are a compass that helps you make design decisions throughout your projects.
And in order to successfully interact with technology, the users must overcome these two challenges:
- Evaluation: Understanding the system state
- Execution: Taking action to accomplish a specific goal
Norman described these challenges as the “gulf of evaluation” and the “gulf of execution” because, in order for the users to achieve their goals without barriers, there must be effective design elements.
In his book — The Design of Everday Things — Don Norman highlights the seven stages of action when accomplishing a task.
- What do I want to accomplish?
- What are the alternative action sequences?
- What action can I do now?
- How do I do it?
- What happened?
- What does it mean?
- Is this okay? Have I accomplished my goal?
The insights from the seven stages of action lead us to seven fundamental principles of design (Baterbee):
- Discoverability makes it easier to understand where to perform actions
- Feedback communicates the response to our actions
- Conceptual models are a simple explanation of how something works
- Affordance is the perceived action of an object
- Signifiers tell us exactly where to perform an action
- Mapping is the relationship between the controls and effect they have
- Constraints help restrict the kind of interactions that can take place
The UX Design Blog goes on to provide further examples of each:
Visibility: can I see it?
- This is the most basic principle. The more clear and visible functions are, the more likely users will be able to know what to do next. In contrast, when functions are “out of sight,” it makes them more difficult to find and know how to use.
Feedback: what is it doing?
- Feedback is about sending back information about what action has been done and what has been accomplished, allowing the person to continue with the activity.
Constraints: why can’t I do that?
- The design concept of constraining refers to determining ways of restricting the kind of user interaction that can take place at a given moment.
Mapping: where am I and where can I go?
- This refers to the relationship between controls and their effects in the world. Nearly all artifacts need some kind of mapping between controls and effects, whether it is a flashlight, car, power plant, or cockpit.
- You want this mapping to feel as natural as possible. It should feel natural and intuitive and mimic what we see in the world.
Consistency: have I seen this before?
- This refers to designing interfaces to have similar operations and use similar elements for achieving similar tasks. In particular, a consistent interface is one that follows rules, such as using the same operation to select all objects.
There are 4 types of consistency:
- Aesthetics — e.g. brand consistency across all platforms
- Functional — e.g. traffic lights
- Internal — e.g. within the same system: the majority of beach signs are similar around the world
- External — eg: different software file bar in the example below
One of the best ways to drive consistency across applications is to make ample use of Google’s Material Design Guidelines and iOS’s Human Interaction Guidelines when designing mobile applications.
Affordance: how do I use it?
- An affordance can be anything. It’s an attribute of an object that allows people to know how to use it.
- For example, a mug has high affordance: it’s easy to figure out intuitively how to use it.
Planes have a long history of improvements many based on user experience design improvements that follow Don Norman’s principles. This started with the famous B17 bomber in WWII which was initially thought to be too complicated to fly, however with a series of systematic useability tweaks, went on to fly many millions of miles without a single incident.
In closing, Norman provides the following advice:
“The designs of our products and services must also follow this philosophy. So, to the designers who are reading this, let me give some advice:
- Do not blame people when they fail to use your products properly.
- Take people’s difficulties as signifiers of where the product can be improved.
- Eliminate all error messages from electronic or computer systems. Instead, provide help and guidance.
- Make it possible to correct problems directly from help and guidance messages. Allow people to continue with their task: Don’t impede progress — help make it smooth and continuous. Never make people start over.
- Assume that what people have done is partially correct, so if it is inappropriate, provide the guidance that allows them to correct the problem and be on their way.
- Think positively, for yourself and for the people you interact with.
It’s not you. Bad doors are everywhere. — YouTube
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More like this from 10x Curiosity
- Survivorship Bias — We see this “Surviving” population as somehow special when in actual fact it might have got there through no more than sheer ass.
- The Multi-Armed Bandit — to explore or exploit? — When faced with a decision to go with what you know or strike out in a new direction, which do you choose?
- Normalisation of Deviance — Normalisation of deviance is a trap in human psychology that has led to many disasters over the years
- Antifragile — Becoming stronger with failure — Antifragile. A thought provoking concept developed by Nassim Taleb in a book by the same name.
- Until it sticks… Turning up every day… — Engineers can learn a lot from artists. Quality work over a career doesn’t come from chasing short term fires but rather the discipline of turning up every day and just starting
