Imagine this situation, “You got to a cafe and try to enter it by pushing the door. It doesn’t budge. You try harder. Another person comes pulls the door and walks in looking at you push the door. You try to hide the embarrassment by smiling at him. “Of course, you have to pull the door,” you say to yourself , “it was your fault”.
Donald A.Norman in his book “The Design of Everyday Things” says that it is not your fault. The fault is mostly on the design. If you look closely he says you can always find a fault in the design.
Donald A.Norman is a University Professor, Company Advisor, and Board Member, Keynote Speaker, Author of several books and columns. He is considered to be one of the people who first gave importance to user-friendliness rather than the aesthetics of the design.
Most of the problems are old because this book was written 32 years ago. But the lessons learned here are timeless because with the advent of technology, the design problems have not become less but on the contrary, have become more.
It took me more than 2 weeks to complete and fully understand this book.
Points to remember while designing anything :
- Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head: Give natural cues in the environment which can help the user to easily understand the relationship between the possible outcomes and actions. People also learn faster and feel more comfortable.
- Simplify the structure of tasks: Simplify unnecessary complex tasks. Pay attention to how many active thoughts the human memory can be pursued at once. Put the load of remembering how, what, when, on the object rather than on the user. Minimize interruption. Provide aids to allow for recovery of operations that was interrupted.
- Make things visible: Make things visible so that the user can create a mental map between the action and the effects of their actions. It should be readily perceivable, interpretable. Make the outcomes of the action obvious.
For example: Even if there are a lot of buttons/controls on an airplane. The pilots can navigate through it easily because one button/control does only one action. The design of the button/control makes it clear to the pilots that if that they want to land the plane they have to pull down the lever. The lever does only one action, bringing out the landing gear. Designing a button/controls that do several actions can make it extremely difficult. But we should also remember that simply adding more buttons will not solve users’ problems.
- Get the mappings right: Make sure the user can determine the relationships between
- Intentions and possible actions (for e.g. intention could be to open the door and possible actions could be to push or pull the door)
- Actions and effects on the system (For e.g. the pulling of the lever down is the action and the effect is the bringing down of the landing gear.)
- Action system state and what is perceivable by sight, sound, or feel. (for e.g. the blinking light and sound that appears once the ATM transaction is completed so that the card can be pulled out)
- Between the perceived system state and the needs, intentions, and expectations of the user. (for e.g. the perceived action of the switch was different than the intentions and the expectations of the user in the Three-mile accident thus almost putting an entire city in danger read more about it here.)
Give feedback that matches the user’s intention and must be easy to understand. Make use of external pictures, graphics, or sounds.
- Design for error: Predict and anticipate the errors that users can make. Always give a chance to reverse the errors the user will make. Support user’s responses do not fight them.
- When all else fails, standardize: If you can’t design without difficulties, Standardize. Create an international standard. Users may have to be trained to learn the standard (for example alphabets, measurement, driving, etc.,). But when we make a standard we have to keep in mind about future technologies.
For example: Think about the clock. It has been standardized throughout the world. Now think about a clock whose numbers have reversed anti-clockwise. It will be very hard for us to tell the time. Same clock. Same time. These clocks do exist (it is called a reverse clock) but they may seem impractical to us because all over the world it has been standardized. So it is not needed to change the standard here.
This book is recommended to people who want to design products that will help your users use design effectively and also to people who want to know why so many products are unusable.
Links:
- Donald A.Norman : https://jnd.org/
- The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition : https://www.amazon.in/Design-Everyday-Things-Don-Norman/dp/0465050654
