Highlights
- The total experience of a product covers much more than its usability: aesthetics, pleasure, and fun play critically important roles (View Highlight)
- There was no discussion of pleasure, enjoyment, or emotion (View Highlight)
- To understand products, it is not enough to understand design or technology: it is critical to understand business (View Highlight)
- Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself (View Highlight)
- Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable. (View Highlight)
- The one thing I can predict with certainty is that the principles of human psychology will remain the same, which means that the design principles here, based on psychology, on the nature of human cognition, emotion, action, and interaction with the world, will remain unchanged. (View Highlight)
- With the passage of time, the psychology of people stays the same, but the tools and objects in the world change. Cultures change. Technologies change. The principles of design still hold, but the way they get applied needs to be modified to account for new activities, new technologies, new methods of communication and interaction. (View Highlight)
- The design of the door should indicate how to work it without any need for signs, certainly without any need for trial and error. (View Highlight)
- “coffeepot for masochists.” (View Highlight)
- Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding. (View Highlight)
- Discoverability: Is it possible to even figure out what actions are possible and where and how to perform them? (View Highlight)
- Understanding: What does it all mean? How is the product supposed to be used? What do all the different controls and settings mean? (View Highlight)
- most of the problems come from a complete lack of understanding of the design principles necessary for effective human-machine interaction (View Highlight)
- Engineers are trained to think logically. As a result, they come to believe that all people must think this way, and they design their machines accordingly. (View Highlight)
- The solution is human-centered design (HCD), an approach that puts human needs, capabilities, and behavior first, then designs to accommodate those needs, capabilities, and ways of behaving. Good design starts with an understanding of psychology and technology. Good design requires good communication, especially from machine to person, indicating what actions are possible, what is happening, and what is about to happen. Communication is especially important when things go wrong. It is relatively easy to design things that work smoothly and harmoniously as long as things go right. But as soon as there is a problem or a misunderstanding, the problems arise. This is where good design is essential. Designers need to focus their attention on the cases where things go wrong, not just on when things work as planned. Actually, this is where the most satisfaction can arise: when something goes wrong but the machine highlights the problems, then the person understands the issue, takes the proper actions, and the problem is solved. When this happens smoothly, the collaboration of person and device feels wonderful. (View Highlight)
- An affordance is a relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used. (View Highlight)
- The presence of an affordance is jointly determined by the qualities of the object and the abilities of the agent that is interacting. (View Highlight)
- To be effective, affordances and anti-affordances have to be discoverable—perceivable. (View Highlight)
- If an affordance or anti-affordance cannot be perceived, some means of signaling its presence is required: I call this property a signifier (View Highlight)
- Perceived affordances help people figure out what actions are possible without the need for labels or instructions. (View Highlight)
- Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where the action should take place. We need both. (View Highlight)