I really appreciate Norman’s passion for good design, and his anger toward bad design. I too sometimes have a hard time opening doors and working simple devices, and it makes me irrationally angry at that device, or person who made it, for making me feel so incompetent, but mostly for unnecessarily causing the stress and frustration.
He says that the human mind is made to decode, interpret, and problem solve, and bad design thwarts this natural tendency by creating confusion ( fear and anxiety. ) He talks about an experiment that showed positive affirmations produce dopamine and enable out-of-the-box problem solving and creative thinking. Tension, stress and anxiety stimulates hyper focus and enduce a narrow minded approach. In his TED talk he used the example: Deadlines are useful for completing tasks because they create a level of anxiety that helps narrow your mind, and make you less distractible. In the article he distinguishes modes of thinking “depth first (focused, not easily distracted) or breadth first (creative, out of the box thinking, but easily distractible).” These are influenced by emotion, or affect. So our emotional response to the object determines with what mindset we will approach an object. The design can be made to illicit a particular emotional response.
Beautiful things work better by allowing us to have a breadth first positive affect and therefore overlook minor design issues.
Principles of good design :
1-Provide a good Conceptual Model- Visibility of function: effects of our actions should be easy to predict – interacts with person’s mental mode for that device -The mental mode is the expectation for that device based on experience, perception, and interpretation. And 2- Responsiveness, Feedback
1- Provide a clear Conceptual Model:
Natural Design, is his term for using natural signals, signals that can be interpreted subconsciously.
Affordances of objects and materials: Their naturally perceived uses. “Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. . . . no picture, label, or instruction is required. . . [when they are required], the design has failed.”
I think the beauty of objects from the later article would fit somewhere in here. Emotional response to an object directs our interaction with it, and approach to it. It doesn’t necessarily make it easier to read, but makes us more patient and interested in figuring it out.
Mapping: (VISIBILITY) between controls and the effect on reality (responsiveness)
Natural mapping – uses cultural standard and physical analogies, so is easy to understand.
Additive qualitites: amount and loudness (weight, length, brightness), incremental increase
Substitutive dimensions: pitch, taste, color, location, substitute one value for another, there is no comparative concepts of more or less.
2 – Responsiveness and Feedback:
Causality is psychologically very important; lack of clear responsiveness suggests that your action had no affect.
Also from the TED talk: Our experience of an object comes in three forms: Visceral, Behavioral, and Reflective. Object processing : Visceral (subconscious), enjoying the appearance of the object or not, being attracted to it, wanting to touch it, being repulsed, Behavioral (subconscious), feeling that you are in control, sensual feelings, intuitive feelings, Reflective, doesn’t control muscles, movement, or expression. This is the voice in the head, state of consciousness reacting as much to it’s self consciousness and context than to the object itself. Examples: Hummer or environmentally conscious cars or expensive watches- reflective design, they are more about your image and your ideas than the object itself. There may be better designs, but they don’t say the same thing about you.
Cognition is perceiving, interpreting, Affect is emotion, reacting, telling, judging: assigning positive and negative values. Cognition and Affect effect and influence each other. We can perceive the emotions of others, as they are expressive. Likewise, an object can express emotion, suggest a feeling, and generate a reaction.
It takes five or six tries to get a good design, but a brand new revolutionary product will fail forever if the first attempt doesn’t work, therefore new products and ideas are almost guaranteed to fail.
As technology improves, we have more options, and usability declines, as in the watch example. But “the paradox of technology should never be used as an excuse for bad design.”
Good design makes people happy, produces dopamine, and enhances creative problem solving, and leads to better interaction with the design!!
His examples are helpful. I especially am interested with good design eliminating the need for signage. You should not need signs if the architecture directs you around a place, or the placement and shape of controls makes it clear what they are for (as in a car or the bus example). Signs can even be distracting.
Its interesting, and important, that cars are designed for intuitive understanding. The driver cannot read and research the manual while they are busy driving and looking at a million signs.. The transportation system relies primarily on signs to let users know how to use it. Without the signs it would often be impossible to know what to do. Signs are great for making life-death information very clear, but relying on them causes issues and frustration and, as a result, less creative thinking. Some more intuitive and effective physical references are secondarily employed: speed bumps, the wake-up rattle lane, sharp turns for speed reduction, traffic circles, New Jersey jug handles, road dividers, painted yellow and dashed/solid/double lines, etc. These physical hints are way more intuitive and effective because they define the physical space and limits that the driver perceives. Signage is perceived secondarily, and with great effort. To make it more difficult, it is sometimes placed inconsistently . It can be extremely frustrating to look for signs while driving, having no idea how often or where to expect the next one. Highways near tolls are a good example. The road continues to suggest “Go fast in a straight line, this is a highway” . The signs start to warn of a toll approaching, but it takes time to process when and people never seem to have slowed enough or found the right lane until they are slamming on their brakes, crossing six lanes, getting in fights, and panicking right in front of a toll booth: the booth itself is a physical reference telling you to stop before you crash into it.
When people, like me, are terrible drivers, its probably not because there is anything confusing about the car, but more the interaction with the road and sign system, the speed limits, and all of the less intuitive parts of it.
As in his example of the usability of a car with hundreds of functions, vs the complexity of the telephone, with only twenty functions, the controls should be placed in intuitive locations, and the number of functions should not too much exceed the of visible Controls. They should have obvious correlations to the physical response of the object (natural mapping), so the user doesn’t have to guess about the use of the button. This reminds me of the last reading, where the iPod was discussed as an example of good design. As with the iPod shuffle, eliminating many controls that they believed were unnecessary, apple made an important design decision that created a more intuitive interface. This onion article talks about apple’s limiting design, with their release of the laptop wheel, a laptop that only has the wheel control, simplifying the user interface to create the simplest laptop interface ever made (and this is the phone in his example): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA
I wanted to participate in his design challenge, but I immediately imagined something that has already been made.
So his design challenge from the 80s has been solved. Creative design has made taking features away, in this case, unnecessary. The intuitive and pretty interface makes getting to know it enjoyable.
Design innovation like this is probably the reason for his more optimistic attitude in his later writing, and in his TED talks, when he says “The new me is beauty.” He has become more interested in what makes things beautiful and attractive, and what this alone does for us. He is interested in how our emotional empathy allows us to connect with objects that illicit it.
He gives this example of a Jake Cress Chair:
Here are his similar designs:
