Reflection 3 — The Design of Everyday Things
The book I chose to read this semester was The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. The author is an expert in the fields of design, useability engineering, and cognitive science. He is a co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, a user experience consulting firm. He is also an IDEO Fellow and is currently the co-director of an international initiative to rethink design education, an idea he co-founded.
I had been interested in reading this book after a friend had recommended it to me. My Masters program is in Digital Media Design for Learning and I’m pursuing a UX specialization, so I felt like this was required reading for myself.
Overall I felt the book was really useful, and it definitely has caused me to be more mindful of the design of objects I interact with every day. The book covers a lot of ground, which meant that interspersed with topics I found really relevant (the psychology of everyday actions; constraints, discoverability, and feedback) there were also sections I found to have more coverage than I found relevant to me (for example, an in-depth review of the classification of slips versus mistakes, two categories of human error).
One of the key insights I had from the book was the importance of conceptual models in design. According to Norman, to interact with a product we need to be able to discover what it does, how it works, and what functions are possible. This is known as “discoverability” and it is driven by the application of five factors: affordances, signifiers, constraints, mappings, and feedback. But without a sixth — conceptual models — a user wouldn’t have a true understanding of how the thing works. Norman defines a conceptual model as a highly simplified explanation of how something works. It doesn’t have to be complete or even fully accurate; it just has to provide a user with the general idea of how the thing works. One example is the files and folders on a computer screen. There aren’t actually documents and folders inside of the computer, but using those as icons helps the user understand the basic structure and organization. Recognizing this concept has helped me see where this is lacking and present in everyday experiences.
A second insight from the book is related to mapping: the idea that natural mappings can vary between cultures. A more obvious example: in English or other European languages, it words are read or written left to right, so for us, a natural timeline moves left to right. But in Hebrew and Arabic, it is read in written in a right to left format. So, in those cultures, a natural timeline would progress from right to left. Norman reminds us that every point of view is correct; what’s important is to be aware of the audience for whom a product is being designed, and take cultural differences in mappings into consideration.
