Chapter 7: User-Centered Design
Summary:
Author Donald Norman talks about characteristics of a good design. He also talks about simplifying difficult tasks like making use of natural mappings, giving proper feedback, simplifying the structure of the tasks, exploiting the power of constraints and when everything else fails, making use of standardization. Three aspects of mental models are - design model, user's model and system image. Manuals tend to be less helpful than they should be. They are often written hastily after the product is designed, under severe time pressures. Complex tasks can be restructured and simplified. Ideally, the user should have an option to choose automation or full control. With some sort of simplification, there's sometimes a trade off. For example, digital watches make it easy to read time but it's hard to estimate how much time has past since an earlier reading.
With automation, human becomes the servant of the system and is in no control left with the user. The author says that standardization is the solution of last resort. If no design can be creative and self-intuitive enough, then there a need to adopt a commonly accepted solution. This is standardization. For example, the order of the clutch, brake and the accelerator in the car.
Discussion:
This chapter was like a summary of the book. The author has mentioned automation, simplification of tasks and natural mappings before and so this chapter was a little repetitive. However, it was a great summary that briefly went over all the important aspects of a good design.
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