The Design of Everyday Things

The Design of Everyday things is basically a book all about making sure that simple objects should be simple to use. The author goes through several stories about people he has seen or talked to that have had trouble opening doors, operating VCR's and other devices that people frequently use. He states that there needs to be clues or signals or signs on these everyday devices so that a user has to spend very little, if any, time trying to figure out how to use the device. Often, a designer will design an object or device with only aesthetics in mind and doesn't consider the usability of the object. You can make a door as beautiful and elegant as you want, but if no one can figure out how to open it, what is the point? However, if you are designing a door that is meant to be hidden, it's probably a good thing if the average person cannot figure out how to open it.

Ever since I read this book, I've taken a notice to how usable (or unusable) things can be. The other day, one of my professors spent over five minutes looking for the switch for the projector screen. One would thing that it would be on the wall near the projection screen or on the podium next to the computer terminal, but it wasn't. Also, I used Internet Explorer the other day, because there were no other browsers installed on the computer, and I noticed that some of the tabbed web pages at the top were different colors. I found this feature annoying so I right clicked on the tabs and then clicked "Ungroup Tabs".

How did I know to do this? I had never seen this feature before. I easily noticed that whenever I had multicolored tabs, there were always at least two that were the same color. I then realized that all the tabs of the same color were links from the original page that I had opened in new tabs and could be "grouped" according to that. I was able to figure all that out in very little time and without really thinking about it. That is good design.

Ever since reading "The Design of Everyday Things", little things like that now stick out to me and I believe that I will be more concious of how a user would interact with interfaces I design as a result.