Design Intellignece #2

1. I felt the one of the key points of the book The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman was the fact that simple everyday objects were too complicated to use. The fact that people were having trouble opening doors was a perfect example of this. It seems almost ridiculous that an object as simple as a door could have the ability to confuse people but surprisingly it happens quite often. I also thought another key point that the author tried to get across was the idea of conceptual models. A conceptual model allows the user to get a sense of what his or her action may have. For instance, a door with a long horizontal handle will probably have to pushed in order to open the door. A good conceptual model will allow the user to use the item easily. However a bad conceptual model can send the wrong message and confuse the user. For instance, take the example of the projection slide remote. The student had no idea that he had to press the button a different way to make the projector go forwards or backwards. I also thought that mapping was a key point in this chapter. In this case mapping is the relationship between the controls and their the controls effect on the world. A product with good mapping can be easily used such as a car. The window controls are near the window, radio controls near the radio, etc. Perhaps the only thing that could confuse a user are the pedals, I would have no idea how to distinguish the clutch, brake and accelerator from each other.

2. I remember I had trouble setting up my father's printer at his office. I was trying to set up the printer so that it would be connected to the wireless internet so that everyone could print their documents and reports. I remember that I had misplaced the manual but I had already connected everyone's computers to the network and I thought that connecting one printer would not be too difficult to handle. After a half hour I had scared off most of the workers in the office. I was sweating profusely and cursing at the printer trying to get the stupid machine to work and I had gotten no where. Even after I found the manual I still could not get the machine to work properly. The design was fairly simple, it had a up, down, left, right, and an OK button. However, the controls were the only things that were simple. Trying to understand the computer jargon was like trying to read Chinese. I had to use a crude system of trial and error to see if I had programmed the printer correctly. I think that the printers controls were not mapped correctly, there was no correlation between the controls and the outcome that control would have. I think the problem that I had was very similar to the problem the author had with the telephone. There were so many functions that the phone had but it only had a few buttons to operate these functions.

3. The designers of the Ipod did an excellent job of making the Ipod user friendly. The Ipod only has a few functions and they are labeled well. The play button plays music, the menu button takes you to the menu and the scroll wheel lets you scroll through music. The controls give visual clues to the user that allow them to use the Ipod with ease. Also these buttons only do one or two things, nothing else.

Thanks for reading,
Ted Hwang

3. The creators of the Ipod