Finished Reading: “The Design of Future Things”
I took advantage of the holiday break to polish off the rest of Don Norman’s “The Design of Future Things,” (since the book sat languishing on my desk for a few weeks). Having enjoyed Norman’s previous works, “The Invisible Computer”, “The Design of Everyday Things”, and “Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things”, I found this to be more of the same, with a focus on new design (as opposed to an examination of existing designs). It addresses the question: “How can we be sure the designs of the future work for us, instead of the other way around?”
His ‘conversation’ with a machine at the end of the book was especially amusing and provides context for providing some human-machine interaction design rules from the machine’s perspective:
Design rules for human designers of “smart” machines
- Provide rich, complex, and natural signals
- Be predictable
- Provide good conceptual models
- Make the output understandable
- Provide continual awareness without annoyance
- Exploit natural mappings
Design rules developed by machines to improve their interactions with people
- Keep things simple
- Give people a conceptual model
- Give reasons
- Make people think they are in control
- Continually reassure
- Never label human behavior as “error” (rule added by the human interviewer)
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