Josh Myers, Jared Wright, John Zachary
Summary:
The Design of Everyday Things (DoET) was a book that used examples of poor design cases to make points about what designers should do. The predominate point that the author is trying to make is that when designing objects, it is more important to consider how easy to use the object is than to consider how the object looks. He covers topics such as natural mappings, the gulfs of evaluation and execution, among other design considerations. Not only does he discuss things such as the previously stated that should be considered for making objects easy to use, he also talks about common misconceptions that people forget to take into account such as that you as the design will be more familiar with the control of you object than the user no matter how ignorant you try and act. This book does a good job of getting the reader back to looking at the basics of good design before trying to do more advanced design aspects.
Discussion:
The best part of this book was that it had a counter-culture approach to design. In today's world we seem to push more and more to aesthetic appeal than usability appeal, but if we were to stop and think about life, I think we would find more complaints about things not working like you want them to than things not looking good enough. The author also does a good job of using multiple examples of design instead of just trying to describe faults in design. If the author had just stated problems I would probably have tended to blame the user of the device of doing something stupid. By vividly describing situations I was able to relate to the person who had trouble using whatever object it was and see that the problem was not with the user but the object. In the end the book was a success because it managed to get me to go against common theme in the world that tell me that everything should do as much as possible while looking as good as possible, and instead focus on the user being able to do what they want as easily as possible.
Even though I believe the book was a success, that does not mean it did everything well. My biggest complaint with his arguments is that he seems to look at things primarily from the usability aspect of design. In the modern world you cannot focus so much on this aspect exclusively. Even if an object is highly usable, if it look like junk then the customer will most likely walk right past it in a store. Things such as cost of development and aesthetic appeal are important to customers. He seems to talk about things in a world will each customer will test each item before buying, or if they don't like using an object will go get another type. Great design is only useful if you can get the customer to use it. If you have the greatest product, but no one ever sees it then you have nothing worthwhile.
My second complaint is that the author talks about mental maps as if changing the controls to model the actual system would make it easier for the user to use the product. I disagree that this is not always the case. If we map the control on a refrigerator to model the actual system, then the user would be upset since the controls would be more complicated to understand. If I gave one control for the temperature and one for the amount of air going to the freezer versus the refrigerator, I predict either the user would only use the temperature control, or they would never be sure exactly how to change the temperature in just one and get frustrated trying. By keeping the controls the way they are the user is able to turn the freezer knob and the freezer will get colder. The fact that the refrigerator may change temperate is not noticed by the user and the user is still happy. Ignorance is bliss. I believe the user is happier with simplistic controls than if they had controls that accurately mapped what was happening in the system.
If I was going to extend this work I would try and focus more on common misconceptions or fallacies in poor design. I would focus on this aspect because they are probably the hardest to notice. It is easy to see that you are sacrificing usability for aesthetic appeal, but to notice that you are using certain learned knowledge like it is natural restrictions is harder to learn.
The design that I liked is that of a light socket from many lamps. I like the design for three reasons. First there is only one real way to control it at first sight and that is to turn the knob. The second is that if you turn the knob the wrong way, nothing bad happens. Lastly is that opposed to pull string I do not have to worry about knocking the lamp over as I operate the device.Image from http://www.paxtonhardware.com/products.asp?dept=118&grp=1
