Week 3

The Design of Everyday Things and html

Most of my time this week has been dedicated to reading articles on effective interfaces, and reading The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman, a book suggested by my mentor Yihuan. I've found this book very interesting so far. The author offers thoughts on affordances and conceptual models, two elements of an intuitive design. Affordances are instances in which there is only one clear way to accomplish the given task. For instance, you know immediatley to push a door that has only a mounted plate where a handle would go on a door you might pull. This is because without a handle, you cannot pull or slide the door; therefore, you must push. Contrarily, a door given a handle that is meant to be pushed often confuses users. So generally, if a layout can be designed so that the only clear way to accomplish a task is the intended path of action, users will intuitively navigate the layout as desired. The author also discussed conceptual models; essentially, if you can map controls of a novel layout to a familiar layout, interaction comes intuitively. For example, if a hovercraft were controlled by a steering wheel and acceleration pedals similar to that of a car, a car driver could easily control the hover craft, having never done so previously. The difficulty with conceptual maps is they are often culture dependent, and thus standardizing them becomes difficult. As I continue with planning the design of Snag' Em, affordances and conceptual maps are two elements I intend to incorporate.