September 28, 2005

Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things

Or, as he calls it, DOET. I really enjoyed this reading. Norman articulated many aspects of experience design that I have long thought about.

The thesis of the first chapter could really be said to be, "Keep people in mind when you are designing something." I think part of the reason the principles laid out in DOET appeal to me so much is that a large part of my life philosophy is, simply, "Keep people in mind when you are doing something." I'm a very conscientious person. I develop feelings of discomfort when I realize I am hindering someone's ability to do something. This is pretty prominently pronounced while walking on the sidewalk: I am very aware of my surroundings and don't like to be in someone's way. I naturally gravitate to the side of the sidewalk when I am walking, and when I realize I need to stop and turn around, I will first slow down and then peel off the main foot-traffic flow. When I am having a conversation with someone, I find it difficult to concentrate if we are in a public thoroughfare and in the way, and I'll try to nonverbal influence the person I'm talking with to kind of scoot out of the flow.

So perhaps I'm especially inclined to be concerned about how an object's poor design would hinder someone's ability to operate it.

An example of an object the design of which I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about is the cell phone. I have had two different models of cell phones myself, and used many others' phones, and I think they are truly ripe for design/experience improvement. For instance, my cell phone still doesn't display the time while I'm on a call. Since I have ditched a wristwatch for my cell phone's time display, I am basically unable to check the time while I'm talking to someone anymore.

On my most recent phone, I had to connect to the web in order to send or receive a text message. This is incredibly irksome, because it takes usually over a minute to connect to the web. And then, once I had connected to the web and navigated to my "messaging center," I was no longer able to access my phone's address book so I had to resort to writing down people's cell phone numbers on a piece of paper and then connecting to the messaging center, re-entering the phone number (the phone's input defaults to text input, too, so I had to change it back to number-only input), and then finally being able to send the text message. As a result, I almost never sent or read text messages. My new phone, thank goodness, has fixed this oversight.

Another, more subtle example, is the paltry "recent calls" list on the phone. It only holds 10 numbers at a time for each of missed calls, recent calls, and outgoing calls. I know that the phone's memory must be much larger than this, so why not have a larger list? This could be an option that is not readily available (having only 10 numbers at a time is usually sufficient for basic "recent calls" needs), but I for one would like to be able to go back to a day two months ago and see who I called, and who called me, if for no other reason than curiosity.

Again, I enjoyed reading what Norman had to say; his words resonate well with me, for I too am always finding "Norman doors" and other poorly-designed objects. I had long read the website of his colleague, Jakob Nielsen (useit.com), but hadn't yet heard any words from Mr. Norman. I'm glad I did.

Posted September 28, 2005 03:31 PM. Categories: Readings , Week 3 | Permalink