In the book, The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman emphasizes how the user experience of a product is a crucial element for deciding the success or failure of the product. In this post, we bring 5 important lessons from the book that should be kept in mind while designing a product.
#1 Improve Comprehension
The user should be able to understand the purpose and function of the product easily. Affordances and Signifiers help in aiding the customer to use the product efficiently.
- Affordance: What are the possible actions a user can perceive to be performed on the product.
- Signifier: The cues which indicate ‘how an object should be used’ or ‘affordability’.
By providing good affordances and signifiers in a product, the users would effortlessly use the product with lesser ambiguity. Eg: A circular door knob signifies that the door can be unlocked by rotating the knob.
#2 Align the user’s intentions with the system’s actions, and the user’s perception with the system’s output
- Gulf of Execution: Gap between the user’s intentions and the system’s input to perform an action
- Gulf of Evaluation: Gap between user’s perception and system’s actual output
By understanding the mental model of the user, we should design the system’s model in a way to bridge the above-mentioned gulfs. This can be done by keeping things visible, reducing cognitive load, offering feedback on the user’s actions and combining the knowledge in the world with the knowledge in the user’s head to easily operate the system. For example: Bookmarks have been used in the physical world to mark important pages in books. The same metaphor has been carried forward with web browsers to mark important web pages.
#3 Understand what you are solving and who you are solving for
Focus on following the user-centred design philosophy. We should be able to define user personas by performing user research to understand their goal, behaviour and needs. We should also involve users for formative feedback, early in the cycle during the solution phase. If feasible, we should also consider co-creating with the user which might help in aligning the product to the user’s mental model.
#4 Design for Errors
Try to identify the edge cases where the user might get stuck from the beginning and solve them. This can be done by performing usability audits for the product. If a user still faces errors, be generous. Don’t blame users for causing the errors. Use the identified errors as an opportunity to iterate and make the product better. Additionally, using constraints could be a good way to avoid errors. Use constraints to convey that there is only one way to use the product. For example, switches have a constraint of being bidirectional, eliminating the possibilities of user actions.
#5 Design for Accessibility
Remember that you should design for inclusivity. Your user persona is a group of users. The product should cater to all of them. These users might have diverse abilities and backgrounds. For example, we should ensure that the product does not only use red to show errors and green to show success. Users with colour blindness might miss the cues and will not comprehend. Having a supported iconography of an error icon and a tick icon would help in conveying the message properly.
Lastly, standardising is one of the best ways to build a great user experience. For example: reutilizing the Android’s Material Design Library would help in maintaining the affordability, accessibility and usability of the product.