My design notes from the book ‘The design of everyday things’
Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability & understanding. Discoverability : Is it possible to even figure out what actions are possible & where & how to perform them? It results from application of 5 psychological concepts: affordances, signifiers, constraints, mappings, & feedback. Understanding: What does it all mean? How is product supposed to be used? What do all different controls & settings mean?
All artificial things are designed.
Design is concerned with how things work, how they are controlled, & the nature of interaction between people & technology.
Designers need to focus their attention on the cases where things go wrong, not just on when things work as planned.
A chair affords (‘is for’) support & therefore affords sitting. Glass affords transparency.
In mapping concept, controls should be close to the item being controlled.
Feedback must be immediate & informative & it has to be planned.
The best solution is to be agreed upon standards, so we need to learn the controls only once.
The hard part is to convince people to understand the view points of the others, to abandon their disciplinary viewpoint & to think of the design from the viewpoints of the person who buys the product and those who use it, often different people.
There are two parts of action: executing the action & then evaluating the results: doing & interpreting.
[image 7 stages of action]
The seven stages provide a guideline for developing new products or services.
- Goal
- Plan
- Specify
- Perform
- Perceive
- Interpret
- Compare
People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!
Conscious learning is necessary to learn most things, but after the initial learning, continued practice & study produces what psychologists call ‘over learning’.
