One of the truly great books about design. This book mostly focuses on designing things so that they are easy to use by people.
The main thrust of the book is thinking about where information about how to do things "lives". The book claims that this information lives in one of three places - in the mind, in the world, and in constraints in the world. The book goes on to make a very convincing argument that moving as much knowledge as possible out of the mind and into the world, or constraints in the world is a good idea as it saves human cognitive capacity - people don't have to learn how to do things, they just do them naturally.
There are a number of suggestions as to how to accomplish this:
- Appearances should reflect reality
- People can become superstitious easily - combat this by giving them good mental models
- Make feedback immediate and unambiguous
- Make it easy to analogize new activities to ones that people are already familiar with
- Precision is only needed to distinguish between choices - make them look different from each other
- Design Multi-functionality carefully, it is difficult to predict users' actions
- Easy decisions are either narrow or shallow. Don't make users play chess
The book goes into these principles in a great deal of detail with some lovely examples that make these principles quite obvious. All in all an excellent book. I can't wait to read the others in the series.
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