BYOMSPM

While reading The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman I challenge you (me) to not just write down notable quotes from the book but also add your own critical response to each.

Here goes nothing.

Chapter 1

“If it needs instructions or a manual, it was not design well. A well-designed product should be totally intuitive.”

-The Design of Everyday Things, p. 3

First I’ll note that Norman adds that sufficiently complex products are an exception to this rule. That said, I began adamantly assuming this position starting at work the day after I read this because it rung so true to me. We know that products intuitive enough to not need a manual exist — for example, most modern phones and computer products have the set-up experience and onboarding built into the product and don’t require consultation of any manuals. But humans are lazy. And a lot of products are designed by people who aren’t incentivized, for whatever reason, to make the products so intuitive that they don’t need any kind of manual or documentation. What factors into this? From my very limited experience, it seems to take way more effort to design a seamlessly intuitive product, and it’s only possible with a deep understanding of the user and their motivations as well as extensive effort spent on design and execution. I would love to see some sort of graph or visualization of this, but my intuition says that achieving the last ~10% of the user experience on the way to reaching a 100% seamless, intuitive experience could end up taking as much effort as getting the first 90% of the UX. Aka, it can be really tempting to declare that something is “good enough” given, you know, the limited nature of money, time, resources, etc. So, with that in mind, how do you make the case for spending the resources to achieve that last 10%?

“Experience is critical, for it determines how fondly people remember their interactions.”

-The Design of Everyday Things, p. 10

I know this is referring to product design, but I think this is true for human-human interactions as well. I am reminded of the sentiment, “people remember how you made them feel,”(not an actual quote) signifying that the feelings evoked from an interaction leave the longest lasting impression rather than the technical details of the interaction (regardless of whether it’s human-product or human-human). This also reminds me of an Explained episode I watched the other day on memory in which they explained that world champion memorizers employ emotion-based memory tricks to remember exceptionally long strings of numbers or letters. Takeaway: emotions matter.

Norman then begins discussing the nature of affordances:

“…affordance is not a property. An affordance is a relationship. Whether an affordance exists depends upon the properties of both the object and the agent.”

-The Design of Everyday Things, p. 11

This seems worth diving into a little more. Norman mentions that this is relevant for people of different abilities, specifically in reference to classic definitions of accessibility but also in terms of characteristics of an agent such as physical strength or atomic size. He also comments on the fact that affordances must be either perceivable or signified, or else they cannot truly do their affording. The following is an exercise I did outlining what I believe to be some of the affordances of a ceramic coffee mug and each of their dependencies on characteristics of the agent.

Object of interest: a ceramic coffee mug

Affordance	Contingency on Agent
Can hold liquid	Dependent on agent knowing how to position mug
Can be held	Dependent on agent having physical ability to hold objects of this weight by a handle (i.e. young children probably couldn’t)
Can sit on a surface	Dependent on there being a flat enough surface (I’m imagining sitting on a rock during a hiking trip with no flat surfaces around)
Can be used to drink	Agent has physical ability to lift and drink liquid
[anti-affordance] Cannot be dropped from tall heights	Contingent on surface being hard

My main takeaway from this exercise is that, while I understand that affordances are qualities of the relationship between a product and an agent, it’s unclear to me how the context and environment factor into the definition, as it seems like there’s a lot of overlap. Also, it seems like you could get really carried away with an exercise like this.

Next, Norman distinguishes between affordances and signifiers:

“Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where the action should take place. We need both”

-The Design of Everyday Things, p. 14

The effectiveness of signifiers seem like one the most critical aspects to determining how intuitive a product is. Norman mentions the importance of both successful intentional signifiers as well as the elimination (or at least control or maintenance) of unintentional, misleading signifiers. I’m guessing that it would be hard to predict with great accuracy the full effect of all signifiers (intentional & unintentional) in a product, but iterative designs based on feedback along with user testing would probably help optimize this.

Then we pivot to another key aspect of product design: feedback.

“Poor feedback can be worse than no feedback at all… Too much feedback can be even more annoying than too little… but worst of all is inappropriate, uninterpretable feedback… too many announcements cause people to ignore all of them, or wherever possible, disable all of them…”

-The Design of Everyday Things, p. 24

Norman follows this by laying out an example of uninterpretable feedback that is often motivated by cost reduction efforts — a single light or sound to indicate many different things depending on the pattern of blinks or beeps. I became noticeably, viscerally angrier as I read through this example, picturing in my head recent frustrating experiences I’ve had with dishwashers and laundry machines that are the most prime examples of all of these feedback flaws. I guess this isn’t really a critical thought, but I deeply resonate with Norman’s assertion that feedback is rendered ineffective when there is too little, too much, or it is unclear.

The last quote that resonated with me touched on conceptual models, another key aspect of product design:

“A good conceptual model allows us to predict the effects of our actions… There is no need to understand the underlying physics or chemistry of each device we own, just the relationship between the controls and the outcomes.”

-The Design of Everyday Things, p. 28

This reminds me of my conceptual model of a manual transmission car. I have no idea if the image I have of different-sized gears separating and being pushed together in response to the position of the gearshift and clutch is an accurate depiction of reality, but it is the fact that I’ve been able to create a predictable mental model of the system that allows me to successfully operate the car. According to the book, it’s not the level of detail or technical accuracy of the conceptual model that’s most important but rather how predictable the outcomes of controls are when using a given conceptual model. Also, after I read this, I realized that this helps to explain key frustrations that users are having with a project I’m working on – their conceptual model of the product does not lead them to correct predictions of results, causing confusion and frustration. Exciting!

Thanks for reading.

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Works Cited

Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things. MIT Press, 2013.