This post is part of the ongoing series of reading reflections on HCI papers and articles. You can find the other posts ‘here.’
THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY THINGS
From “The Design of Everyday Things” Book by Donald A. Norman
This article emphasizes the need for ‘good design’ in everyday objects. It shows, through various examples and illustrations how good design can improve quality of life. The article explains what makes a design, a ‘good design’: discoverability, and understanding. What facilitates discoverability: affordances, signifiers and mapping; and for understanding: feedback, and conceptual models.
While reading through the article, I tried to think of examples of bad design, and not complying with the prescribed principles and was surprised that there are very few examples, which I think is great from a User’s perspective. Some of the observations I made going over digital interfaces are:
- Almost all digital interfaces are designed to be discoverable, and understandable. The only exception I could think of is the ‘Settings’ page on a mobile phone, which is a very complex page, but even then, it is designed to be discoverable through the search bar, which made finding any setting very easy.
- Almost all interactions within an App had an accompanying signifier, nudging/informing the user that an action can be performed here. All carousels had page indicators, showing there are more pages to explore, all buttons had distinctive colors and outlines, and for content overflowing outside, there were scroll indicators or gradients/shadows indicating there is more content to explore. The only exception was when any object had a ‘long press’ action, which was not indicated anywhere, and the user had to discover it by trial and error, but even then, on closer inspection, most objects with long press actions had a raised 3D effect (eg. iOS Notifications on the Notification Center, App icons on iOS Home Screen), which was a signifier that the object was interactive.
Therefore, I found it challenging to find examples of bad design, and I think this is a great testament to the amount of effort that has gone into designing modern digital interfaces.