The Design of Everyday Things

1) What do you think the author's key points in this chapter were?

In the opening chapter of The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman explores the idea that objects should not just be easy to use, but obvious to use, and that they should give the operator subtle hints as to how to interact with the object. This idea is expressed eloquently in the example of the German charter bus, and the way that the driver describes the layout of the controls, "Everything is exactly where it ought to be."

2)Think of a specific object that you have had difficulty using. How did design contribute to making it difficult to use? Does the usability problem arise from one of the principles that Norman discusses in this chapter?

My first Mp3 player was a Panasonic Shockwave, and it was the embodiment of everything that a computer device shouldn't be, it was relatively large for the amount of storage it had, lacking in ergonomics, and above all difficult to navigate. The device was not designed so much as a purpose-built computer, but as a CD Walkman only with a small flash drive in place of an optical disk drive. Even with a capacity of only 256mb, this still made for an incredibly unwieldy system, having exactly the same control panel as a CD player, an extremely rudimentary options menu, and no song directory at all, forcing the user to select songs by panning through them individually, which was only slightly annoying until you realized that that meant waiting for the songs to load individually, meaning that after hopping through about 2.5 albums worth of songs to get to the one you were looking for, the AA batteries that you had just inserted, would die of the exertion caused by looking for your music. Suffice it to say, I was unhappy with my hundred and thirty dollar piece of plastic junk.

3) How did the designers of the iPod address the principle that Norman discusses here?

By contrast, the iPod was built with a flair for minimalism, and yet the iPod managed to be simple to use as well, because the interface allowed for the selection of songs as opposed to the incremental skipping of songs, and because the controls were not meant to be learned, so mush as simply understood. The "Click Wheel" is the ultimate example of this, nowhere does the click wheel say go this way for down, and this way for up, it simply entreats the user to turn it, because that is the obvious thing to do with it, and upon turning the wheel, the operator comes to find that it works in exactly the way that one would expect it to, in fact, i many ways the operator knows before they even touch the device what it will do.