Designing Everyday Things

1
Designing Everyday Things

• Norman introduces design sensibilities

2
Agenda

• Questions
• Your reactions to Norman
• Normans heuristics
• Design advice

3
Don Norman

• Unext Nielsen Norman Group
• Formerly
• HP
• Apple
• UCSD
• Writes A LOT!!

4
Your thoughts

• What did you pick up from the book?

5
My thoughts

• Good examples
• car
• VCR
• watches
• doors
• Relatively few computing examples

6
Heuristics abound

• natural mapping
• visibility
• perceived affordance
• memory
• in world vs. in head
• recog over recall

7
Natural mappings

• Examples
• Objective

8
Visibility

• Some artifacts obscure functionality
• Make capabilities perceivable and interpretable
• Counteracting forces features, aesthetics,
  abstractions

9
Affordances

• Perceived properties
• Relationship between person and object and
  interaction
• Combination of good visibility, natural mapping,
  constraints, feedback

10
Affordance examples
11
Designers are not users

• Im a human, after all.
• Real customer not always end-user
• The challenges of design
• features, aesthetics, cost

12
But HOW?!?

• It is easy to criticize after the fact
• summative expertise
• Normans not the only one (see Web)
• Hard to prevent problems
• formative expertise

13
Normans formative rules

• What are they?
• Design goals
• mental models
• visibility
• use constraints
• provide feedback
• natural mappings

14
Constraints

• Convey possible / appropriate actions
• physical (floppy disk, keys)
• semantic (menu graying)
• cultural (red/green)
• logical (spatial)