Something that drives me crazy is doing laundry on campus. Many of the drying machines in my building don’t show the duration of the cycle/program, so it is hard to know exactly when it will finish and often times, I end up making multiple trips to the laundry room just to take out my clothes from the dryer. The washing machines are also not without their problems – even though they have timers that show how much time is left for the cycle to finish, the timers are often inconsistent and don’t match up with the progress of the washing programs. I feel that my laundry experience would be so much better if the laundry machines enabled me to: 1. know exactly how long it will take 2. by the time I get to the laundry room after my alarms go off, my laundry is actually finished and I don’t have to wait extra 10-15 minutes for the machine to stop spinning. Something as routine as laundry should be intuitive and not become a guessing game.
I think the ideas mentioned in the book are all applicable and relevant to interactive media. Affordances and signifiers are important to make the interaction between the user and the system clear. For example, buttons should look clickable and links need to be presented in such a way to indicate that they can be clicked. The controls that allow the user to interact with the system need to logically map to their effects to provide an intuitive experience. When the user performs an action, they should get a feedback signal to notify that their actions were registered.