[MARCH] The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

[Liz England]

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious—even liberating—book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization. The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time.

There’s two editions - I recommend the newer “revised and expanded” version, but as usual it won’t matter which you read from for the club. There’s also an audiobook available (Audible has it) in case you want to follow along that way.

As Duncan mentioned, there will be some overlap between this book and Universal Principles of Design from last month.

If you’re going to GDC, there’s a related talk on this topic: The Design of Everyday Games by Christina Wodtke

[r.gasc...@gmail.com]

 I read most of this back in college, but almost every day I think about the introductory chapters. The idea that human error is almost always actually a design error is such a good designing principle for most tools.

 So when working on the introductory segments of any experience, it's important to guide people down the happy path. Always assume that your user will just bang their keyboard randomly at whatever point if they can. There's of course the explicit "press WASD to move" dialogs. But also things like putting people into a very limited path and only one item. You put them in front of some puzzle with only one item, and they'll likely get through it. Put them in front of some puzzle with multiple items, and some people will not use the right thing.

 I think a lot of the ideas in Everyday Design are about making things easier to use, but sometimes difficulty of use is a feature in games... For example the difficulty of executing fighting moves is part of the experience in fighting games. Or the whole Eve Online UI (which involves a lot of windows open all over the place and its own integrated web browser). Sometimes the objective isn't to get people to get to the end of the game, but to get them confused. I think you can take some ideas in this book and apply them "backwards" and get some interesting game mechanics.

 There's a tidbit in there about water faucets that I particularly like. When you have a single-control sort of kitchen faucet, one could imagine that this is somehow connected to a thermostat and you are controlling the water going in. But what's actually happening is you have two water sources, and this faucet controls the mixture between the two water sources. Even though you can use the faucet fine, the internal mechanism is obfuscated so advanced usage can mess up. This is to counter with the "two-knob" design, where you end up seeing quite clearly that your lukewarm water is a mix of hot and cold water. The mechanism is super transparent and so you can immediately see how this tool was built:

   

   I think this sort of indirection could be good at building intermediate heuristics in games. The single-faucet design means that the user can control the temperature, but it hides the internal mechanism. So the user can advance at first without knowing exactly what's happening. It's only later that you might discover that you're actually mixing instead of controlling temperature (which could lead to different sorts of thought processes). Give the users a tool that's actually the combination of multiple smaller tools, but making that not obvious until later. 

But if you do want to reveal the internals from the outset, a "two-knob" design will work better.

 It's really interesting how you end up wanting some aspects of bad design to make good game design!  Though if you have a lot of people "playing it wrong" you might be hitting some more fundamental issues, and some plain good design could help ;)  

 Raphael

[Lisa Brown]

"I think you can take some ideas in this book and apply them "backwards" and get some interesting game mechanics."

This is a fascinating idea that I hadn't considered! Now I want to try and apply it :)

I have read the original version of this book, but picked up the revised and expanded version. The update is significant, and if you've only read the old one, the new one feels like a fresh read worth comparing. For the most part, the differences lay in updated examples. One thing I did enjoy about the old version was how, after his chapter on the horrors of operating old office phones, he essentially predicted the smartphone to an impressive degree of accuracy. In the new version the entire chapter on phones is removed, since it has (thankfully, in his opinion) become irrelevant. 

I haven't quite finished the revised edition yet, but I found what I had read quite relevant last week at GDC when watching Celia Hodent's lovely talk about the UX of Onboarding. It helped to have a baseline for some of the vocabulary of UX, knowing how an affordance is different from a signifier, etc.

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[Justin H]

Personally, I was struck by that distinction between affordances and signifiers. I confess, I've often used the word affordance to mean what here is called a signifier.

In digital design, since there is complete freedom in choosing what signifier to use for an affordance, I suppose the trick is choosing a representation of something with a physical-affordance that is analogous to the digital-affordance the software has.

Things get fuzzy for me again with virtual worlds. I wonder if Don Norman would say a virtual door affords or only signifies being opened... ? Perhaps I'm overthinking it.

"I think you can take some ideas in this book and apply them "backwards" and get some interesting game mechanics."

Yeah, and even if you're not designing a puzzle or strategy game, the player is being introduced to a potentially very complex system, and designing-in friction at the right places early on can be valuable for on-boarding. It reminds me of this excellent article I read last year: http://mkremins.github.io/blog/doors-headaches-intellectual-need/

The basic idea is "problem-solution ordering" - let the player get a little frustrated with the problem before giving them the solution, so that they better understand the relationship between the problem and solution. For example, if doors need keys in your game, don't make it easy for them to accidentally pick up the key on the way to the door, of they won't understand it's solving a problem for them.

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[Adam Moore]

I got a late start on this month's reading and I haven't finished the book yet, but I wanted to bring up a conversation that this book sparked between myself and a woman who never considered herself a gamer and didn't purchase her first video game console until a few years ago in her mid-twenties. The first (and only) game console she has purchased was the Nintendo Wii and the Wiimote has been the only game controller that doesn't make her feel incompetent when she plays games. This was a big reason for the success of the Wii expanding to a broader audience than people that identify themselves as "gamers".

She has tried to play games on the PlayStation 4 but even the best tutorials in the games she has played show symbols that she doesn't understand for controls and assume that she knows where each of the nearly 20 different buttons on the controller are. It was never communicated to her that she could press the joysticks down as buttons. When the game tells her to press L3 or R3, she can't find those buttons. When the tutorial shows her a symbol for a button she has to look down at the controller to find the button before she can press the right button. She feels like she can't play games with that controller because it's too difficult to use. She can't complete certain challenges in games like Portal because she can't perform the actions she wants with the controls fast enough. She can see how to solve the puzzle but she can't execute on that solution, which prevents her from progressing in the game.

Game controllers are everyday things for us, but they aren't everyday items for everyone. If we want more people to play our games then we need to rethink how we communicate to new players how to hold and use controllers. Too often we leave prospective players feeling frustrated and incompetent, which prevents them from purchasing game consoles and the games for that console.

[Kevin Day]

I managed to finish last night, what a great read! I have now been noticing small things like door handles and other things I have to interact with more frequently. It was cool to learn about the push bars on doorrs, because the current office building we work in doesn't have them. The thing that interested me the most however was the following quote from pg 133:

Somehow, when a device as simple as a door has to have a sign telling you whether to pull, push, or slide, then it is a failure, poorly designed.

This got me thinking towards tutorials in games and how they could be better improved, or designed, to not spell out exactly what a player has to do. This reminded me of Egoraptor's Megaman video, which I am guessing most here are familiar with but just in case you aren't you can find it here - https://youtu.be/8FpigqfcvlM?list=PLu5a9-aw8CA_xRgSUtUjcEem6d_cJk9Mx (WARNING: NSFW language and some loud yelling).

He does a pretty good analysis of both Megaman classic and Megaman X, in that these games taught you how to play by showing prior to making you interact with things. There are no signs, pop ups, or tutorial windows to explain how to play games so it comes off as really good design. I think this also goes back to what you had to say Adam, in that controllers went from simple one or two button controllers on to more complicated ones. Due to the new complexity we have to come up with tutorials to now explain all the buttons on current gen pads. I've often wondered why there isn't some memory type game or app that comes with consoles to teach new game players where buttons are on the controller, and then from there the games can teach players their individual button contexts.

This also brings up the mapping of controllers. The D-pad makes sense, in that it usually controls the direction of the character so I would consider it a good mapping. However, the other buttons offer little in terms of this until the game either tells you or you experiment by trying each one. I don't know how one could solve this, as there is some standardization between similar types or genres of games, but it could change for each one. I think that over time you take the common knowledge of how most games work and it becomes easier, but I would agree it is somewhat difficult to break into it. I think it took me a good month to get used to the original Xbox controller hahaha.