Every designer wants to create the most innovative, intuitively understandable design of their product, but in order to do that, it’s essential to understand what a great design is. During the reading, I was connecting the dots between the previous reading about interactivity and the one assigned for this week. Great design and interactivity go hand in hand because excellent design makes the user experience more interactive while also improving discoverability and understandability.
In the text, the author states that the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding. I only partially agree with the following statement. Even though I believe that it’s crucial to make a user familiar with the functionality of your product, I also believe that the aesthetics and beauty of the product are no less important than discoverability and understandability. No matter how functional the thing is, if it doesn’t draw attention or if it’s not perceived as an eye-pleasing creation, it will not reach as many users as it could. Therefore, I believe it’s of the utmost importance for a designer to consider the functional side of the product by enhancing its performance, the logical side by improving discoverability and understandability, and to also focus on producing an aesthetically pleasing creation.
The reading helped me sort out the thinking process behind enhancing the discoverability of the design by providing six fundamental psychological concepts, which are affordances, signifiers, constraints, mappings, feedback, and conceptual models, that I will try to implement in my future works.