The design of everyday things. Knowing what to do; constraints, discoverability, and feedback

Here I provide my thoughts that popped up during the reading of the forth chapter “Knowing what to do: constraints, discoverability, and feedback” from “The Design of everyday things” book.

Key take aways

• physical constraints are, probably, the easiest for designers to apply. As it’s hard to violate them, plus they are cultural-independent.
• other constraints: cultural, semantic, logical are very important as well and quite difficult to spot as you have another backgroud

Diversity

I remember many examples of poor ad strategy. When a new company tries to open a new market and fails dramatically! How important it is to have diverse teams working on these projects. When you try to tackle something new — current strategies/principles might not work. The same is applied when you’re designing a new thing, especially when you do it for people that are not like you, that live in different environment, speak another language, pray another god. Revealing some internal constraints — is a key part rather your product will be useful or you will spend huge amount of money on “your education”.

I think this whole chapter is a good example showing how important it is to understand that other people are different and 100% don’t think same way as you do.