This Week’s reading focused on the importance of aesthetics and presented the idea that aesthetics , along with utility are both equally important . Don Norman’s example of the three teapots is pretty interesting and illustrates the idea of how personal preferences depends on mood .
The idea of ‘affect’ that Norman discusses was something new to me . He talks about positive and negative ‘affect’ and how each of these can be useful depending on the situation . From a design perspective, it makes sense to make designs with high utility if the intended use is in highly-stressful situations . On the other hand, if the intended use is in a more relaxed environment, giving weight to aesthetics can have a highly positive impact on the user.
I was thinking about the question of what is more important ? Usability or beauty . After this reading , I think the answer is that it depends from situation to situation and as designers , it is our responsibility to think about what exactly should we emphasize.
The article ‘Her Code Got Humans On The Moon’ taught me the importance of looking at and dealing with edge cases even if they might be trivial . Despite Margaret Hamilton’s seniors telling her that :
“(We had been told many times that) astronauts would not make any mistakes,” (she says.) “They were trained to be perfect.”
She still added notes to the code which turned out to be very useful when an astronaut did indeed make a mistake .
Both these articles gave me 2 important lessons that I wish to keep in mind when designing something in the future –
1) Both Usability and Aesthetic are broadly speaking ,equally important , however , their importance also depends on their specific use cases that must be considered .
2) It is always useful to look at edge cases and prevent unintended errors – even if they are unlikely to occur.