Why is it that we can get into a rental car and know what 43 out of the 45 buttons do, but we can’t figure out how to use call forwarding on the 12-button phone that has been sitting on our desk for 10 years? This wonderful question was raised many years ago by Donald Norman in his landmark book, The Design of Everyday Things. In the spirit of Plato, Norman notes that we already have a mental model in our heads of every thing and every task. Those things that are easy to use map into our mental models are user-friendly and those that don’t are difficult to use. When they map well, Norman says that the design has good “affordance” and those that miss the mark have poor affordance. Failed products and services have poor affordance: Think of the AT&T video phone which was promoted for almost two decades with zero success.
Design Secrets of the iPhone and BlackBerry
Why is it that we can get into a rental car and know what 43 out of the 45 buttons do, but we can’t figure out how to use call forwarding on the 12-button phone that has been sitting on our desk for 10 years? This wonderful question was raised many years ago by Donald […]
April 03, 2008