I feel that Donald's main theme of this article is the psychology of design, such as why we feel certain ways about certain designs. He broke this down into 4 major points; affordance, visibility, mapping, and feedback. When one, or in many cases all, of these points aren't there, a product is hard to use and takes a longtime to figure out. When these 4 points are present, we are left with an intuitive, easy to use product.
think of a specific product that you have had difficulty using. how did design contribute to making it difficult to use? does the usability problem arise from one of the principles that norman discusses in this chapter?
There are so many products, now that I think about it with all my mad design knowledge, that are just bad from a usability standpoint. Refrigerators that cant change temperature, telephones that have countless (often unused) features which are impossible to access, doors that you don't know how to open. But I think the product that I have had the most unnecessary trouble with is my car radio. Trying to deal with all the buttons that aren't labeled and afford nothing at all. After 5-1o months of experimenting I was finally able to program the presets. Yay! But the next time I got into my car, they were gone again. I never did figure out how to use that device. I think that in terms of the Norman's principles none of the buttons had visible functions, and none of them afforded any purpose.
how did the designers of the iPod address the principles that norman discusses here?
Reading this chapter, almost everything that Norman said made me think of the iPod. It seems to follow all the rules perfectly. The scroll wheel has a natural relationship between scrolling up and scrolling down. There are 5 buttons to do 5 different features. It has aesthetic value without giving up function. It gives you a visual feedback as to whether or not your command did anything. It has got it all. Steve Jobs and co. must know what they are doing.
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