This is from Chapter 7 of “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald A. Norman:
Seven Principles for Transforming Difficult Tasks into Simple Ones
How does the designer go about the task? As I’ve argued the principles of design are straightforward:
1)    Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head
2)    Simplify the structure of tasks
3)    Make things visible: bridge the gulfs of Execution and Evaluation
4)    Get the mappings right
5)    Exploit the power of constraints, both natural and artificial.
6)    Design for error.
7)    When all else fails, standardize.
This is the final chapter in Norman’s book, I am not going to break down …read more

In looking at Chapter Six of The Design of Everyday Things we begin to talk about the issues with being the designer.
One of the topics discussed is how the designer thinks that they are still a regular person and are designing based on what people want. However in reality the designer has been attached to the product and project so long they are an expert at using it and do not see the design flaws that are there.
“Designers have become so proficient with the product that they no longer perceive or understand the areas that are apt to cause difficulties.” …read more

In continuing my series on interface design I want to talk about chapter four of The Design of Everyday Things. Now this book isn’t strictly about designing web interfaces like the other book I am reading is, however this talks about design in general and gives the reader a lot of interesting things to think about.
One of the recent topics that I read about was design constraints and how they are used to prevent people from making mistakes with various objects. Here are some of the different types of restraints that are built into objects:
Physical Constraints-
Physical limitations constrain possible operations. …read more