In his book The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman gives a very interesting perspective on the measure of effectiveness for everyday things. Norman argues that a big part of the effectiveness of a product is determined by its design and how it is interpreted by people. He gives the very common example of door design and the troubles that are associated with opening a poorly designed door. Prior to reading this excerpt of his book, I have not put much thought into blaming the designer of the door for any mistakes made when trying to open it. I found that Norman’s perspective provides a different lens for viewing the design of many products that I had not used before. Norman identifies a few different aspects of effective design and provides a few examples of each. For each of these terms (Affordance, Signifier, Mapping, and Feedback), I wrote about a couple more examples that I have noticed in my everyday life.
Affordance:
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One real-world example of affordance can be seen in the many different AI-assistant products, like an Amazon Alexa or Google Home. These products afford the ability for a speaking person to ask a question out loud and receive a response. Although the assistant may not understand a particular question or command, it will provide some sort of response tailored to the request. Generally, this affordance allows people to interact with the numerous features of an AI-assistant in a hands-off approach.
Another example of affordance can be seen in a digital context, in the form of an ad-block extension. The extension can afford multiple things based on the person in the relationship. For a user, an ad-block extension affords the ability to hide any advertisements when using a website. For the website and ad-providers however, an ad-blocking extension provides an anti-affordance for a user to see their promoted content.
Signifier:
Signifiers can be found in many different aspects of our everyday life. One such example can be seen in food products that need to be torn open. These products contain a small cut on either end of the package, signifying where the package should be opened. Although they are paired with a “tear here” sign, the slight cutouts alone are enough to indicate that the package can be torn open at the mark.
In a digital context, signifiers can be seen at the top of pretty much any browser that is commonly used today. Many different buttons contain symbols that signify their function and are universal between most browsers. In the above image of my browser, you can see a plus sign that indicates the ability to create a new tab as well as “x” marks that indicate the ability to close tabs. There are many other signifiers including the back, forward, and home buttons, which have similar icons. These symbols provide a fairly clear indication of the function associated with clicking the button, despite being very simple.
Mapping:
In Norman’s book, he mentions that a straight bar is often used to represent intensity, with “up” being increased intensity and “down” the opposite. In a similar manner, the volume knob inside of a car provides a mapping between physical motion and volume intensity. In my experience, clockwise motion is generally associated with an increase in intensity, and counter-clockwise motion is associated with a decrease. A car radio follows this pattern by providing a mapping between clockwise motion and increased volume.
The image shown above is taken from the settings window in an online game and shows how a user might adjust keyboard inputs with a corresponding action in the game. This feature provides for a very complex mapping but still allows for good design by allowing users to adjust key bindings to fit their preferences. The action to be mapped is indicated on the leftmost column of text and corresponds to the keyboard button pressed in either of the two columns to the right. This allows for a mapping to be made from each keyboard key to a particular action in the game.
Feedback:
Since we use our phones every day for a wide variety of functions, many different forms of feedback can be seen when using them. For a specific example, the lock screen on an apple device provides feedback when a user tries to access the phone. After inputting an incorrect password, the phone will vibrate and the screen will shake, which indicates that the password was incorrect. This will give immediate feedback to the user that they need to try and input the password again.
As a digital example, I choose to look at the installation bar that is used in a wide variety of programs and software. Although this bar does not react to a specific action made by the user, it provides feedback to the user about the progress of an installation. This bar allows the user to estimate the remaining time during an installation and know that the installation process is currently active. Sometimes the installation bar can be unhelpful in the first goal if it moves backward, but will almost always indicate that the installation process is working.