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

I want to look at specific part of chapter 5 in The Design of Everyday Things. This chapter focused on human error, how it happens, and how we need to examine it.
There was a paragraph that really stood out in my mind because the logic in it is so basic and the design is somewhat complex but I never noticed it or thought about it.
Cars provide a number of examples of how design relates to error. A variety of fluids re required in the engine compartment of an automobile: engine oil, transmission oil, brake fluid, windshield washer solution, radiator coolant, …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

There are a couple of things I wanted to tackle this week, one was Facebook’s upcoming change to tabs and I wanted to continue talking about interface design and what I have been learning in my class. Thankfully they kind of intersected and allowed me to look at them together.
In case you haven’t heard Facebook this week showed off a tabbed design profile that will help keep the ever expanding and out of control design of the pages in check. With all the applications it was becoming impossible to navigate people’s profiles. Facebook, which has been lauded for having a …read more

When we are examining interface design another aspect we have to think about is human nature and the psychology behind how we as human beings use things.
In “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman he relates a story about the testing of a computer program years ago and how the return button and the enter button did two different things. For most programs they operate the same but for this particular program hitting the wrong one would wipe out your data. He found this frustrating and was absolutely destroyed by the programmers with them explaining that he “should read …read more

One of the subjects that I often ignore when talking about social media is design. A couple of times I have glossed over the importance of the design of your page specifically when talking about the social networking site MySpace but have never really looked at the subject any more than that.
This semester I am taking a class called Interface Design that really examines how users approach applications and WebPages as well as how they should be designed. Going forward I am going to post once or twice a week and talk about what I am learning in this class …read more