Sometimes we get so caught up in the aesthetic of it all that we forget first and foremost that people are using our products. I recently finished reading Don Norman’s incredible classic The Design of Everyday Things. It was first published in 1995, and he revised and expanded it in 2013, which is the version I read.
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| From https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/840.The_Design_of_Everyday_Things |
I learned about core concepts of design such as affordances, signifiers, and natural mapping. At the same time, I gained so much from it about life in general. At work, if I find myself laying the blame of failures to the errors of others, I remembered Norman's lesson that a so-called human error is really a design error. I am learning to empathize. I learned to not accept the norm caused by bad design and to always think of ways to improve.
I think that society often wants to find a person to blame. That kind of mindset stems from the fact that we believe we can change, or we can actually read the instruction manual, whereas the technology is there to sit. However, I think we could switch that mindset.
Have you ever heard the adage that you can’t change other people? You can only change yourself.
Maybe that is true. However, try this: change the design.
See, throughout all of history, humans have not changed. Meanwhile, technology has changed a lot. So everytime we push a door instead of pulling it, throw up our hands in frustration at a confusing faucet, or simply avoid that new stand mixer because there are too many scary widgets on it, why do we force ourselves to change? The design of technology can change.
As Norman puts it, “when people err, change the system so that type of error will be reduced or eliminated.”
Here are some more quotes from the book that resounded with me:
After all, why do we make products? We make them for people to use.
The unaided mind is surprisingly limited. It is things that make us smart. Take advantage of them.
The same technology that simplifies life by providing more functions in each device also complicates life by making the device harder to learn, harder to use. This is the paradox of technology and the challenge for the designer.
Yes, technologies may change, but people stay the same.
Technology changes rapidly, but people and culture change slowly. Change is, therefore, simultaneously rapid and slow. It can take months to go from invention to product, but then decades— sometimes many decades—for the product to get accepted.
the heavy momentum of legacy inhibits change.
One way of overcoming the fear of the new is to make it look like the old.
The principle of desperation: If all else fails, standardize.
Hindsight is always superior to foresight.
So I resorted to the most powerful tool employed by experts the world around—I banged on the cabinet. And yes, it opened.
For anyone who is considering growing old
Sometimes, bad products succeed and good products fail. The world is complex.
It is not a threat to professional competence to be human.
The design projects all the information needed to create a good conceptual model of the system, leading to understanding and a feeling of control.
And finally, praise, bless, and amen to Norman’s section on Things that make us smart:
Couple the use of full-body motion and gestures with high-quality auditory and visual displays that can be superimposed over the sounds and sights of the world to amplify them, to explain and annotate them, and we give to people power that exceeds anything ever known before. What do the limits of human memory mean when a machine can remind us of all that has happened before, at precisely the exact time the information is needed? One argument is that technology makes us smart: we remember far more than ever before and our cognitive abilities are much enhanced.
Another argument is that technology makes us stupid. Sure, we look smart with the technology, but take it away and we are worse off than before it existed. We have become dependent upon our technologies to navigate the world, to hold intelligent conversation, to write intelligently, and to remember.
Once technology can do our arithmetic, can remember for us, and can tell us how to behave, then we have no need to learn these things. But the instant the technology goes away, we are left helpless, unable to do any basic functions. We are now so dependent upon technology that when we are deprived, we suffer. We are unable to make our own clothes from plants and animal skins, unable to grow and harvest crops or catch animals. Without technology, we would starve or freeze to death. Without cognitive technologies, will we fall into an equivalent state of ignorance?
These fears have long been with us. In ancient Greece, Plato tells us that Socrates complained about the impact of books, arguing that reliance on written material would diminish not only memory but the very need to think, to debate, to learn through discussion. After all, said Socrates, when a person tells you something, you can question the statement, discuss and debate it, thereby enhancing the material and the understanding. With a book, well, what can you do? You can’t argue back.
But over the years, the human brain has remained much the same. Human intelligence has certainly not diminished. True, we no longer learn how to memorize vast amounts of material. We no longer need to be completely proficient at arithmetic, for calculators—present as dedicated devices or on almost every computer or phone—take care of that task for us. But does that make us stupid? Does the fact that I can no longer remember my own phone number indicate my growing feebleness? No, on the contrary, it unleashes the mind from the petty tyranny of tending to the trivial and allows it to concentrate on the important and the critical.
Reliance on technology is a benefit to humanity. With technology, the brain gets neither better nor worse. Instead, it is the task that changes. Human plus machine is more powerful than either human or machine alone.
Society always fears new technology, whether it be the book, the printing press, the cellphone, the Internet, machine learning, or GMOs. I say, dive right in. I trust humanity to move forward with technology and maintain moral and intellectual standards.
