Importance of Mapping in Design.
We often come across everyday products which use design principles widely, to understand these principles its important to observe things and products around us and we can find examples for each of these principles in a product probably in our pockets, on our desk or something at our arm’s length.
Design principles are the guidelines created and defined to help the designer create a valid and functional design which would help the end-user to achieve their goal with ease. Mapping is one of the key principles of design along with other principles as Affordances, Signifiers, Visibility, Constraints & Feedback.
Mapping:
To explain mapping let me take something that is as of now at the arm’s length from me, a computer mouse. It has a scroll wheel, two-click buttons and ergonomic palm rest to hold it comfortably.
So where is the Mapping here??
While using the mouse when we scroll the wheel up it moves the page upwards and when scrolling it down it would scroll the page downwards. Similarly moving the mouse in the respective direction on the desk or on a mouse pad would move the pointer on the screen in the same direction, isn’t it?
What is Mapping then?
Design that conveys the relationship between the user input and the result is said to use Mappings.
Here in the example of a mouse, it’s easier for the end-user to understand its Scroll operation because of the direction of the scroll wheel’s movement being Mapped to the movement happening on the screen.
Imagine the scroll wheel functionality being reversed, What would happen?
Would this be the product user would understand easily or would there be chances of the user being frustrated and make errors after using it for some time?
Yes, you guessed it correctly it would leave the user avoiding the product because of its unnatural mapping.
Natural mapping refers to a design in which the system’s controls represent or correspond to the desired outcome. When controls map to the actions that will result, systems are faster to learn and easier to remember. (Definition by Don Norman in the book Design of everyday things)
Natural Mapping in Digital Interfaces.
Natural Mapping is widely used by designers when they are designing digital interfaces, probably every one of us is actually using it on a daily basis on our mobile phones.
To increase the volume or brightness of the screen on our phone we move the slider towards the right and to reduce the volume or brightness of the screen we move the slider towards left, here the designer has used what is called to be Conceptual Similarity based on our strong cultural metaphor where we all humans are having an understanding that moving anything towards right maps to the higher level and moving anything left maps towards the lower level.
It is important to design any product controls with as much as natural mappings possible because it would allow the user not only to easily predict the desired output of the control but would help him to easily understand & learn the overall functionality of the design and easily achieve their goal.
