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 every single step here because well, you should go out and purchase the book to get his wisdom.

I do want to point out some keywords from his seven steps that I keep throwing around in my head when thinking about laying out different websites I am working on.

Simplify- Just because I can make it fancy doesn’t mean I need to.
Standardize- Give people the icons and the navigation that they are expecting
Visible- By keeping things available and in front of the user without leaving them to guess you get a better site.
Exploit- Take the users for every penny they have… wait just kidding I wanted to see if you were reading still.

I really think that good design is centered around basic logic and with the idea of keeping things simple.

Tomorrow I am going to get more web designed focused instead of general design talk.

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.” (Norman, p.156)

This is something that I ran into at work recently while working with a designer and co-workers in building a community for our website. Some of the things my co-workers were talking when looking at the community was using language that would be unfamiliar to most new users. Not only that but the navigation that was mapped out also didn’t make logical sense when compared to other communities and how they operated. While they made sense to us because we were familiar to the product powering the community and had been immersed in the community every day when we had outside eyes look at it the reaction was not as we had hoped.

We had to remove ourselves from the language and the layout and look at other sites. Our assumptions and nomenclature had to be dropped with a different attitude and approach to how we were going to do things. I can’t even begin to explain how difficult it was to change our mindsets and try to cut our attachments to the project.

While we made some changes I expect that when we get our beta release out that people will begin to comment about the issues that they have. Things that aren’t even on our radar presently that will help benefit our community design, I both look forward to and dread that day.

As the designer you are always the expert and never really unattached.

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, and battery water. Putting the wrong fluid into a reservoir could lead to serious damage or even an accident. Automobile manufacture try to minimize these errors (a combination of description and mode errors) by making the different compartments looks different– using different shapes and different-size openings-and by adding color to the fluids so that they can be distinguished. Here design by and large prevents errors. But, unfortunately, designers seem to refer to encourage them.

Think about the amount of effort that goes into differentiating the different fluids and the systems in a car, as well as the overall impact that it has on the lifetime and performance of a car. But when we look at it we don’t really appreciate it in the least.

However this system to prevent human error probably saves car owners millions of dollars a year yet we don’t consider the impact of the logic that went into this design. Reading that paragraph totally floors me when I think about the impact that such simple logic has on our quality of life.

The thing is I think that logic gets ignored a lot when people begin to design complex objects, you know what I shouldn’t even say complex, when people design anything. So much thought is given to looks and performance that simple things that have a massive impact are often just kind of skirted over.

For example my apartment has a open winding exposed staircase that runs along the main hallway of my house, the entry do the stairs is totally open. In the middle of the night you could totally misstep while walking along the wall and tumble down the stairs. An extra foot of wall would totally prevent this but because the home’s designer wanted to show off part of the stair case I have a massive health risk every time I have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Logic needs to dictate design.

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. Thus, a large peg can’t fit into a small round hole.

Semantic Constraints-

Semantic constraints rely upon the meaning of the situation to control the set of possible actions.

A good example would be when you are putting together a piece of furniture and know that while the knobs to a drawer could be screwed on in the inside they logically go on the front.

Cultural Constraints-

Some constraints rely upon accepted cultural conventions, even if they do not affect the physical or semantic operation of the device.

Logical Constraints-

Natural mappings work by providing logical constraints. There are no physical or cultural principles here: rather there is a logical relationship between the spatial or functional layout of components and the things that they affect or are affected by.

Ever since I read this section I have applied to do how items function and look at them to see what constraints are there. In fact it has consumed me a little, I was actually talking to a date about the design of a door. (Like they do in this chapter). And that the way it set up didn’t make sense and didn’t give the user any hints on how it operated.

Design is involved in everything we do.

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 very clean look to it as compared to MySpace, began to take a beating by social media watchers and users. In a blog post on their developer blog Facebook admitted that they had a problem:

Lately, Facebook profiles have become slower, more cluttered, and somewhat difficult to parse. Over the next few weeks, we’ll roll out a number of improvements to the Facebook profile that are going to make the profile simpler, more relevant, and provide users with a greater degree of control.

Facebook is going to be adding these tabs and essentially making the profiles have two types of interface designs, a global navigation feel for the entire site and a clear entry point setup for the profile. Instead of having a profile that is cluttered users will have these tabs which provide limited options, don’t overwhelm the user, and allow people to explore the point past that. This is the goal of a clear entry point system, which is what google has on their main page.

I applaud Facebook for making this shift, in thinking about the design, use, and navigation of their site they are improving upon the user experience.

Now take a second and evaluate your blog, how is your navigation structure setup?

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 the instructions” and that the company’s secretaries who had been using that program for months have never said anything.

Norman approached the secretaries and asked them about the program.

“Oh, yes,” said the secretaries, “we do that a lot.”

“Well, how come nobody ever said anything about it?” we asked the secretaries. After all, they were encouraged to report all problems with the system.

The reason was simple: when the system stopped working or did something strange, the secretaries dutifully reported it as a problem. But when they made the “return” versus “enter” error, they blamed themselves. After all, they had been told what to do. They had simply erred.

This boils down to a simple philosophy in regards to design, “if an error can occur it probably will be made”.

When people develop a site or an application they need to keep a few things in mind during the process:

-Having a good conceptual model for the users
-Good mappings, so people can understand the relationship between the actions and the results
-Feedback, people need to receive continuous feedback about the results of the action.

In the example above the software system failed in the first two steps during the design process.

Another subject that Norman goes into is memory. I am not going to dive into the subject too much but I wanted to touch on something that I found interesting in his work because I think it plays into intuitive design. When people were polled about what the letters and numbers were on what button of their cell phones, a major majority didn’t have a clue. The same goes for people when quizzed about the layout  of the keyboard, and this goes for users that were typists.

People learn things by doing and repeating, if you design something that is going to function in a different manner than what a learned function is you are setting yourself up for trouble.

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 and how it can be applied to social media and the design of your applications and WebPages. Too often design gets overlooked and even when people spend a significant amount of time on how something looks it isn’t always functional.  In fact for most websites the design interface and navigation is the most complained about topic:

Hopefully these posts will help you understand proper interface design.

Today I am going to examine some of the topics of chapter 2 from the Jenifer Tidwell book, Designing Interfaces. In this chapter Tidwell examines how we organize content.

Information Architecture

When you are going to sit down and develop an application or a website one of the first things you need to think about is the information architecture or as Tidwell says, “dividing stuff up.” A lot of the time designers look at dividing the information up by either nouns or verbs. For example, you blog categories list is usually a list of nouns. While most applications use verbs, like most e-commerce sites, “buy, sell, browse or register”. Also you can take a mixed organizational approach to architecture but you need to make sure that you are laying out things clearly if you do this and make sure you don’t end up with a confusing mixture.

In social media one of the places that I see this misused are blog sites that also act as a front for ecommerce, especially people selling e-books from their blogs. There is usually a poor mixture of a list of object and a list of actions, making the overall navigation of the site confusing. I find it disorientating to go to a blog and have a set of expectations that the blog is going to function like other blogs but then have all these calls to action mixed in with a standard setup. It very rarely is done well.

Physical Structure

Rest of the chapter dealt with physical structure, for a lot of the applications that we are talking about the layouts discussed in here wouldn’t apply. However one of the layouts is something that I think gets overlooked a lot in social media, specifically blogs: having a layout that offers alternative views.
There are two alternate views that people don’t give a lot of thought to when they are designing their blogs: the print view and the view from a PDA. These are two ways that people will access your site and view your information. Not taking these into consideration decreases the functionality of your site.
For wordpress users this is an easy fix as there are multiple plug-ins available that will allow your site to be read properly by PDAs.

Alex King has one that you can find here.

As for a print there is a plug in that will help control how the printed page functions, you can find it here.

How much thought do you put into the design of your social media real estate?