[The Design Of Everyday Things Mobi 23
Julieann Rohde
Did you ever wonder why cheap wine tastes better in fancy glasses? Why sales of Macintosh computers soared when Apple introduced the colorful iMac? New research on emotion and cognition has shown that attractive things really do work better, as Donald Norman amply demonstrates in this fascinating book, which has garnered acclaim everywhere from Scientific American to The New Yorker.Emotional Design articulates the profound influence of the feelings that objects evoke, from our willingness to spend thousands of dollars on Gucci bags and Rolex watches, to the impact of emotion on the everyday objects of tomorrow.Norman draws on a wealth of examples and the latest scientific insights to present a bold exploration of the objects in our everyday world. Emotional Design will appeal not only to designers and manufacturers but also to managers, psychologists, and general readers who love to think about their stuff.
Lots of toilets incorporate a "dual flush." Press one button to unleash a deluge sufficient to sink all but the hardiest of bowel-movements, press a different button to release a trickle designed to gently dilute the user's micturations.
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Hmmm. It didn't have the share destination that I wanted. It was early in the morning - when I'm not at my cognitive best - and I was stumped. There is nothing on this screen - other than the icons - to tell me how I can interact with it. There's no scrollbar, no handle, no "more" icon, nothing.
Even if you don't speak the language written on the doors, the physical nature of the handles tells you what you can do with them. A flat panel can only be pushed. The protruding handle is designed to be pulled. This design feature is known as an "affordance".
How can design signal the appropriate actions? One important set of signals comes through the natural constraints of objects, physical constraints that limit what can be done. Another set of signals comes from the affordances of objects, which convey messages about their possible uses, actions, and functions. Where do we grab it, which parts move, and which parts are fixed? Affordances suggest the range of possibilities, constraints limit the number of alternatives. The thoughtful use of affordances and constraints together in design lets a user determine readily the proper course of action, even in a novel situation.
Let's go back to that accurs'd Android panel. I tried swiping it up - that's what I've learned most panels do in Android. But it did nothing. So I gave up. I didn't feel like battling with my computer to achieve a simple task. I just assumed that Google had chosen a set of default options and I was not allowed to stray from them.
I vividly remember being pissed off 12 years ago at the iPhone's inability to delete podcasts. It turned out that, once again, you had to magically know that swiping a podcast revealed hidden buttons.
Either an arrow to let the user know there's more to the side (maybe even give it a jaunty animation) - or a scrollbar to show how far through a list they are. I'm sure you can think of a dozen better ways to represent a scrollable area than literally nothing!
Flat, minimalist, clean, material - whatever you want to call it - is an annoying antipattern. Computers are here to make life easier for humans. Removing affordances is just a nasty thing to do to your users.
Well said. I hate having to explain to elderly relatives how this stuff works, because there is no logic to any of it. I'm sure back in the 90s usability was the most important UI driver - 3D effects on buttons to make them look like real-world buttons, etc. 1/2
Had exactly this issue with Gboard: added virtual keyboards (for French and Russian) but they were non-QWERTY (annoying). Turns out there are QWERTY/YaWERTY versions available but you need to scroll horizontally to see them (not obvious at all)
I first noticed the tendency of product revisions to destroy power users' hard won knowledge back in the last century, when Microsoft was the prime offender. This was my first experience of "products that only care about unboxing, not deep dive".
This is also about the time when I first noticed new hires in software engineering teams refusing to learn to use the "old tech" already in use, and insisting that we all move to the latest and greatest; at the time, this mostly involved documentation, which progressively needed to be Word, html, wiki, and (currently) MarkDown so as to satisfy the new grads. (The net result was chaos, with older docs not editable - or, sometimes, locatable - by newer engineers. We usually had at least 3 repositories of still relevant docs in different formats.) But who needs to know what the original author had in mind, if they can jump to inaccurate conclusions and thereby introduce bugs?
Later, there was the phase when they all used a Microsoft IDE to edit source code that would be built - and source controlled - on *nix - introducing giant whitespace changes because they failed to notice they're preferred editing environment saved source files in MS$ format by default, and farthermore used a different default number of spaces per tab.
I'm not against improvement, but gratuitous change for the sake of change seems to me to be somewhere between extremely selfish and moderately idiotic. And when the new new thing is worse than its predecessor (e.g. markdown, with multiple incompatible "standards"), I try to avoid being swept along.
I have to day that I find it pretty depressing when UI design from the late 80's ends up vastly more functional than current interfaces. They absolutely don't look like they're out of a Hollywood movie, but the amount of cognitive effort to use an 80's interface was vastly lower.
Very much like the old Facebook "Share" option, which used to place a large translucent white layer over most of the screen on a pc for several seconds. Very annoying, now it seems to have gone to a more discrete notification bar.
Its like trying to look up YouTube comments on a mobile from an email link, first there is no obvious way of opening them and second when you do if the comments section is long it won't open the ones above the comment in the email.So you have no idea what they are referring to, without further shortcut presses.
I think the problem is the same as we are seeing in mass-produced programs, is the rush to get them out leaves the interface full of bugs and unfamiliar idiocracies.
I think aircraft cockpit designers are pretty good at that. Lots of experience and very important to do right. In days of prop planes the gauges for each of the (4) engines were aligned such that when, for example, the oil pressure was at the correct level, the needle pointed straight up. Engineer could easily scan the row of dials and if all needles were NOT pointing straight up, there was a problem!
I was trying to work out how to do something on iPadOS 15 the other day and could not find the menu option that the Internet told me I needed to use. Eventually it occurred to me to try touching the screen between the menu options I could see and moving my finger. The menu scrolled and the option I wanted appeared. There was no visual indication at all that there were more menu options than those I was initially presented. Things change between different OS versions so my initial thought was that I looking at instructions that had been written for an older version of iPadOS or iOS and they didn't work for iPadOS 15. I've been using an iPad for years and still I was confused by this terrible UI/UX.
As digital designers we look for inspiration not just online, but in our daily routine. Being outdoors, shopping and using everyday things.
Besides that it is pretty common to do our research online.
Starting by googling it there are a handful of places where I find myself ending up at again an again.
Curated by creative agency Zurb, comes with patterns not just for mobile. Organized in a clean and concise way, browse through thousands of specific designs and patterns of user interaction. Is is place where designers learn what is working well on the Web and why.
Pttrns is a curated library of iPhone and iPad user interface patterns. All patterns has been hand picked. There is currently 2430 patterns in the library. iOS7 has its own category besides iPhone and iPad.
In my previous post, Breaking Up the Behemoth, I posited an explanation for why OO apps so often evolve a few, disproportionally large, unmaintainable, condition-filled classes. Unfortunately, that post didn't offer a cure for this problem; it just gave the less-than-helpful advice that you avoid that situation.
This post continues to explore the problem of classes that get too large. My hope is by that learning to recognize the imminent appearance of the big-class-slippery-slope, you can avoid accidentally sliding down it.
Most of the ideas here are my opinion. Although this post starts out by examining a broad, general idea, I promise that it does, eventually, directly address object-oriented programming. Read on for the general introduction, or skip forward to the OO specifics, as your inclinations dictate.
So, what are affordances? Merriam-Webster defines affordanceas "the qualities or properties of an object that define its possible uses or make clear how it can or should be used." Wikipedia's affordance disambiguation pagemore concisely suggests "a potential action enabled by an object."
"The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment."
--Gibson (1979, p. 127) 7
(I find myself tickled by his blithe confession that he just plain "made it up". If not for the fact that it would take us on a terrible tangent, I'd pause here and make up a few words myself.)