Don Norman’s The
Design of Everyday Things showed the factors and fundamental principles
that should go into making products that are easily usable and understandable
to the people attaining the products. The first chapter emphasizes that when
product fails to be fully functional and understandable to the user, it is not the
fault of the user. Rather it is the fault of the designer who did not take the
effort to consider how others may be affected by the product. Recently, a
friend of mine was telling her sister how dumb she was for pushing a door meant
to be pulled and I remembered the countless times I fell into the same
situation but never thought much of it. Norman goes on to explaining in the
book that these incidences are an indicator for a problem with the design of a
product. He uses simple everyday occurrences, products, and behaviors to show a
familiar pattern of interactions between people and machines to explain their
place in our lives. He delves deeper into what problems can arise when a user
is interacting with a product. He also looks into the thought processes and
natural behaviors of the engineer, designer, and user when interacting with the
created or creation of a product.
Norman’s book is an interesting read because it introduces new
terminology, like human-centered design, affordances, signifiers, constraints,
mappings, feedback, and conceptual modelling, to introduce principles and
aspects of the human-machine interactions. However, his work is easy to follow
because he will either introduce a term and give its definition and then use a
series of relatable examples to drive his point home. He also does the opposite
where he brings up the examples that many people can relate to when thinking
about their interaction with everyday products and then shows how the new term
can be applied to their and his own situations. For example, he compares the
backseat driver to a machine that gives too much feedback. While both give mostly
accurate information, they are too overwhelming and distracting to actually be
helpful. (pg. 24)
Many of the terms used by Norman have very similar purposes
but he puts emphasis on their differences to show their role in the design of a
product.
A simple product that can be explained well by Norman’s book
is a pen. It “affords” writing, drawing, lifting, moving around and bookmarking
in a text and its anti-affordance is that the writing from a pen cannot be
erased like the writing from a pencil with an eraser at the tip. Both
affordance and anti-affordance are perceivable. The signifier on my specific
pen would be the bottom at the tip that you can push to let the writing tip
out. Other pens could have caps instead and they would signify that the cap has
to be taken off to use the pen. Although you cannot see the complete inside of
the pen, you can see the coil inside and with conceptual modeling and mapping,
you understand that with the help of the coil, the writing tip can go in or out
when the other tipped is pushed down upon.
What intrigued me about the pen was the movement of the ink
from inside the pen to the writing on a page. I understand that the ball point
pen has a small ball that rolls at the tip to get the ink from the inside to
the outside. However, how do other pins without the ball tip transport the ink
out and is there more to the model of pen than one can see? Most pens come in cylinder
or hexagonal cylinder shape and I wonder why and how that came to be the norm
for pens. We can understand the mapping and movement of the pen tip but sometimes, pens "explode" and the ink splotches everywhere and I have yet to know how and why that happens.
