![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Comments on "Design of Everyday Things"
I just finished "Design of Everyday Things" (DoET) by Donald Norman. It's about the way objects are designed and the ways they should be designed, with lots of examples. The book itself is well written and easy-to-read. In many ways, it's what I want Tufte to be. (Tufte writes books full of excellent pictures and neat examples, but I wish he'd actually get to the point, rather than having me guess at a principle, or try to figure out all the better alternatives myself. Don't get me wrong, the books are good, just not as useful as I'd like.)
As I was reading DoET, I found myself bookmarking lots of ideas as interesting/worth keeping track of. Since all you LJ-folk are somewhere between a captive audience and perfectly capable of leaving if bored, I'm going to dump said ideas here.
Boiled down principles of good design (pg 52):
* Visibility: By looking, the user can tell the state of the device and the alternatives for action.
* A good conceptual model: The designer provides a good conceptual model for the user, with consistency in the presentation of operations and results and a coherent, consistent system image.
* Good mappings: It is possible to determine the relationships between actions and results, between the controls and their effects, and between the system state and what is visible.
* Feedback: The user receives full and continuous feedback about the results of actions.
An example that fails many of the above principles is the refrigerator thermostat. Usually you have two controls, one for the fridge and one for the freezer. The problem is, they don't actually do that. Instead, one controls the total amount of cold being put in both fridge and freezer, and the other controls the proportion directed to each. Just to make things "better" it takes around 24 hours to see the change in temperature after you change the controls.
------------------
Lockout mechanisms:
You know the weird staircase gate you sometimes see on the ground floor? I always wondered a bit what it was for and sort of assumed it was to keep people from falling downstairs. Apparently its actual purpose is fire control. "In cases of fire, people have a tendency to flee in panic, down the stairs, down, down, down, past the ground floor and into the basement, where they are trapped. THe solution (required by the fire laws) is not to allow simple passage from the ground floor to the basement." (pg 135)
Similarly (in the designed to make you use it right department), I bring you a bathroom shelving fact. "In some public restrooms there's a package shelf inconveniently placed on the wall just behind the cubicle door, held in a vertical position by a spring. You lower the shelf to the horizontal position, and the weight of a package keeps it there. Why not supply a permanent shelf, always horizontal, placed so that it wouldn't interfere with the opening of the door? ... When the shelf is lowered, it blocks the door. So, to get out of the cubicle, you have to remove whatever is on the shelf and raise it out of the way. And that forces you to remember your packages. (pg 137)"
-------------------
Knowledge in the head and in the world (ch 3). The point is, you don't have to keep track of everything yourself, if knowledge can be built in elsewhere. (Eg: lightswitches on a mini-floorplan so you don't track which switch is which yourself. This is a "natural mapping" like well-laid-out knobs for a stove)
--------------------------
Types of errors (ch 5):
[note: many of these are very similar. Not entirely sure if distinctions are useful in all cases.]
* Capture error (two sequences start the same and you slip from the one you want to a more common one. Counting 1-king instead of 1-10, morphing from playing one song to another that starts similarly, going upstairs to grab something and doing something else entirely)
* Description error (using a tool that meets the same criteria, but isn't what you want, like pouring orange juice into a coffee cup sitting next to the desired glass, pouring oil instead of rice into a measuring cup)
* Data driven error (using the wrong external info, eg: dialing a room number you're looking at instead of the person you want ot reach)
* associative activation error (picking up the phone and saying "come in", because answering phones and doors are associated)
* loss of activation errors (the canonical going somewhere and forgetting what you want to do)
* mode error: (accidentally activating the wrong function [my own example: hitting the spot I expect to be backspace and getting delete instead])
As I was reading DoET, I found myself bookmarking lots of ideas as interesting/worth keeping track of. Since all you LJ-folk are somewhere between a captive audience and perfectly capable of leaving if bored, I'm going to dump said ideas here.
Boiled down principles of good design (pg 52):
* Visibility: By looking, the user can tell the state of the device and the alternatives for action.
* A good conceptual model: The designer provides a good conceptual model for the user, with consistency in the presentation of operations and results and a coherent, consistent system image.
* Good mappings: It is possible to determine the relationships between actions and results, between the controls and their effects, and between the system state and what is visible.
* Feedback: The user receives full and continuous feedback about the results of actions.
An example that fails many of the above principles is the refrigerator thermostat. Usually you have two controls, one for the fridge and one for the freezer. The problem is, they don't actually do that. Instead, one controls the total amount of cold being put in both fridge and freezer, and the other controls the proportion directed to each. Just to make things "better" it takes around 24 hours to see the change in temperature after you change the controls.
------------------
Lockout mechanisms:
You know the weird staircase gate you sometimes see on the ground floor? I always wondered a bit what it was for and sort of assumed it was to keep people from falling downstairs. Apparently its actual purpose is fire control. "In cases of fire, people have a tendency to flee in panic, down the stairs, down, down, down, past the ground floor and into the basement, where they are trapped. THe solution (required by the fire laws) is not to allow simple passage from the ground floor to the basement." (pg 135)
Similarly (in the designed to make you use it right department), I bring you a bathroom shelving fact. "In some public restrooms there's a package shelf inconveniently placed on the wall just behind the cubicle door, held in a vertical position by a spring. You lower the shelf to the horizontal position, and the weight of a package keeps it there. Why not supply a permanent shelf, always horizontal, placed so that it wouldn't interfere with the opening of the door? ... When the shelf is lowered, it blocks the door. So, to get out of the cubicle, you have to remove whatever is on the shelf and raise it out of the way. And that forces you to remember your packages. (pg 137)"
-------------------
Knowledge in the head and in the world (ch 3). The point is, you don't have to keep track of everything yourself, if knowledge can be built in elsewhere. (Eg: lightswitches on a mini-floorplan so you don't track which switch is which yourself. This is a "natural mapping" like well-laid-out knobs for a stove)
--------------------------
Types of errors (ch 5):
[note: many of these are very similar. Not entirely sure if distinctions are useful in all cases.]
* Capture error (two sequences start the same and you slip from the one you want to a more common one. Counting 1-king instead of 1-10, morphing from playing one song to another that starts similarly, going upstairs to grab something and doing something else entirely)
* Description error (using a tool that meets the same criteria, but isn't what you want, like pouring orange juice into a coffee cup sitting next to the desired glass, pouring oil instead of rice into a measuring cup)
* Data driven error (using the wrong external info, eg: dialing a room number you're looking at instead of the person you want ot reach)
* associative activation error (picking up the phone and saying "come in", because answering phones and doors are associated)
* loss of activation errors (the canonical going somewhere and forgetting what you want to do)
* mode error: (accidentally activating the wrong function [my own example: hitting the spot I expect to be backspace and getting delete instead])
no subject
... or because you watch too much original Star Trek!