Writer: Donald Norman
Genre: Cognitive Science
Why do most of the people (that includes me) walk into a cold room and increase the thermostat's temperature to the maximum with the expectation that the room would get heated quickly? We all have a mental model of the thermostat which makes us believe that doing so would heat the room faster than setting the temperature to a lesser but expected value. How many times have you fumbled with the faucets in washrooms wondering if to push them, turn them or just keep your hand under one? And what about those doors? Push them, pull them or slide them! Everyday scenarios, everyday frustrations, aren’t they?
Norman uses such simple and to-the-point use cases to explain the importance of design. The design of everyday things (DOET) previously called 'The Psychology of everyday things (POET)' is an interesting read especially because most of the explanations are so simple that you wonder why you didn’t think of it. My favourite is the gas burner one.....I have a 4 burner stove at home and it never occurred to me that the design could be simplified to match an easier mental model.
Lovely read and a review from Amazon best sums it - It could forever change how you experience and interact with your physical surroundings, open your eyes to the perversity of bad design and the desirability of good design, and raise your expectations about how things should be designed.
A personal copy is highly recommended.
Genre: Cognitive Science
Why do most of the people (that includes me) walk into a cold room and increase the thermostat's temperature to the maximum with the expectation that the room would get heated quickly? We all have a mental model of the thermostat which makes us believe that doing so would heat the room faster than setting the temperature to a lesser but expected value. How many times have you fumbled with the faucets in washrooms wondering if to push them, turn them or just keep your hand under one? And what about those doors? Push them, pull them or slide them! Everyday scenarios, everyday frustrations, aren’t they?
Norman uses such simple and to-the-point use cases to explain the importance of design. The design of everyday things (DOET) previously called 'The Psychology of everyday things (POET)' is an interesting read especially because most of the explanations are so simple that you wonder why you didn’t think of it. My favourite is the gas burner one.....I have a 4 burner stove at home and it never occurred to me that the design could be simplified to match an easier mental model.
Lovely read and a review from Amazon best sums it - It could forever change how you experience and interact with your physical surroundings, open your eyes to the perversity of bad design and the desirability of good design, and raise your expectations about how things should be designed.
A personal copy is highly recommended.
2 comments:
Great read - I agree! This man founded the are of science that is today Human Computer Interaction .Stuff that real research is made of
@Anoop,
Yeah, agreed....research of these kinds are so much the need of the hour...we are complicating too many things unnecessarily i guess
Post a Comment