The design of everyday things. The psychopathology of everyday things.

Here I provide my thoughts that popped up during the reading of the first chapter “The psychopathology of everyday things” from “The Design of everyday things” book.

Key take aways

• there are many roles’ interests to satisfy
• people make errors, always, it will never end
• constructing “conceptual models” inside people’s heads poses a significant challenge

Different roles in the product’s world

• First, author starts with an obvious problem that nowadays lots of machines around us are overcomplicated. From one side he puts a blame mostly on designers, that they haven’t thought about it well enough. But he also highlights, and it’s important, that apart from the designers and users, dozens other roles such as: manufacturers, maintainers, sales, engineers, management, etc. exist within a system. Their interests should also be satisfied. And it’s definitely not an easy task.
• Perhaps if designers had an incentive to prioritize customer satisfaction, we could expect better products? A good example came to my mind: washing machines. If you look at one that you have in your apartment it’s “featured” but, as author noted, you’re using only 1–2 functions out of it. While the ones we have in commercial or association-owned laundry rooms are significantly simpler. They also have more functions than I use but not dozens, plus I can imagine how I can use them.
• So, designers can actually design easier in usage machines… for different customers? As well as manufacturers can produce and sellers can market. But this isn’t the case for the mass-market. It’s an interesting question: why, how, and whether it should be changed. I heard many theories why it happened from quite reasonable to ridiculous ones. But it’s important to remember that there are many roles even in the simple(from the first glance) “keep clothe clean everyday” system. They have different interests, these interests should be satisfied.

Then author focuses more on end users of the product. He doesn’t cover satisfying other roles but it’s important that this aspect was mentioned.

HCD(human-centered design)

• things are built for humans to use, around humans, therefore humans’ nature should be taken seriously
• the key point here is knowledge that people make errors. It’s just inevitable. I heard many times “our product doesn’t work because people are making mistakes/do stupid things/etc.”. Before I really thought that it’s people’s problem. But now I see that we couldn’t expect zero-error rate from people. So the design process should go through this lens: people made/make/will make mistakes, how can you use this knowledge for prosperity?
• Author highlights several fundamental principles of interaction:
  — affordances
  — signifiers
  — constraints
  — mappings
  — feedback
  — conceptual models
• All of them are important for producing good system. But my main focus laid on “conceptual models”.
  — Conceptual models — highly simplified explanation of how something works. From this model people get the knowledge of how to use devices.
  — Without this model users can’t successfully work with the product. They will break staff more often, or the result will be not satisfying.
  — The importance of this model is obvious. And how difficult it is to build such a model inside somebody’s head. If you tried to teach your relative how something works you remember how extremely difficult it is to translate the “image-conceptual model” you have in you brain, that seems obvious to you, into their brain. Not just teach to press buttons in the right sequence.
  — And it’s difficult when you have this person, right here, you’re familiar with this person, talked to this person before. Try to imagine how you can do this with some random person who comes with different background, has another education, speaks another language.