Everyday Things are Broken

Office talk on the first day back turned to what we read on holiday.

Donald Norman’s book ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ (published by Basic Books, 2002 edition) was a good holiday read. As the blurb on the back says, ‘It will do your heart good…’.

Norman’s book examines how people interact with Everyday Things — devices, equipment, appliances. He examines the tasks we need to perform to use Everyday Things, and they’re often not as straightforward as they should be. Norman is firmly on the side of the user.

We may blame ourselves when we can’t open this, or programme that. So it does your heart good when Norman clearly shows that struggling with the mechanical and information demands of everyday life is not always our fault. Many Everyday Things are not well designed.

So how do we cope? The answer is a complex mix of:
•  the psychology of human thought and knowledge — what we know about how things work
•  the psychology of Everyday Things — what information we get from how things look
•  the ability of designers to apply their knowledge of the first two points.

The designer needs to start with the goal to be achieved, consider the actions the user must do, make logical links between the tasks, and provide the user with visual clues.

We like Donald Norman’s debate about Everyday Things because we recognise the designer’s challenge with every document we write. The Write Plain English Standard mirrors the designer’s process — begin with the purpose of the task, consider what the reader must do, make logical links between chunks of information, and provide visual clues to make the reader’s task easy.

But can I use it?

Today is World Usability Day. This year's theme is communication. According to Elizabeth Rosenzweig, founder of World Usability Day, the day will 'serve as an impetus to creating greater awareness for designs, products and services that improve and facilitate communication around the world'.

Usability most often applies to websites. When we're not talking about websites, usability is generally called universal design.

Plain English and usability go hand-in-hand. For people to understand your website, form, manual, email, presentation, or report, you need to communicate clearly. And you need to make sure that your whole audience finds your communication easy to use.

Some usability experts are Whitney Quesenbery, Jakob Nielsen, and Gerry McGovern. New Zealand companies that specialise in usability are AccEase and Optimal Usability.

For information about World Usability Day, see http://worldusabilityday.org/

For information about universal design, see http://www.accease.com/pmwiki.php?n=Publications.UniversalDesign

For information about Whitney Quesenbery, see http://wqusability.com/

For information about Jakob Nielsen, see http://useit.com/

For information about Gerry McGovern, see http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress

For information about AccEase, see http://accease.com/

For information about Optimal Usability, see http://optimalusability.com/