Monday, February 21, 2011

Book Reading 21 – The Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 7 – User-Centered Design
Summary

Norman outlined his POET system with 7 main points: Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head, simplify the structure of tasks, make things visible, get the mappings right, exploit the power of constraints, design for error, and when all else fails, standardize.  He points out more examples of each situation, and how reversing these points can lead to purposely difficult safety mechanisms.  They can also be reversed for use in game design.

Discussion
He tied up his book quite nicely here.  And you could kind of see this whole user-centered design premise forming from the first chapter.  When the user is forgotten as being the main focus of design, products fall way short of what they should be.

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