While reading Don Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things”, I was heavily agreeing with his notes on poor design making everyday tasks unnecessarily difficult. An example I found myself thinking of was of the commonplace microwave. Every student lounge in the NYUAD dorms has been provided with one, but each has a slightly different usability, making it an irritating chore to relearn where all the controls are. Many have excessive buttons with controls such as “Auto-Defrost”, “Popcorn”, or have random food symbols with no clear indication of what that setting does. The button layout is unintuitive, and can make tasks like setting a power level or temperature more tedious than it needs to be. This design could very easily be improved, by removing unnecessary additions, and making more-utilized features like the power-level or the timer more prominent. The arrangement of buttons should logically reflect their use. If there’s a sequence required (such as first setting a temperature, then a timer), the layout should guide users intuitively from left to right or top to bottom.
Terrible design aside, I found many of Norman’s points relevant in terms of interactive media. A key aspect of IM is the user interaction, and a user will not fully appreciate the functionality of a design if it is very unintuitive to use or tedious to learn. Websites, apps, video games, and even art pieces, should have visual cues that are easy to understand and distinguishable. Design shouldn’t suffer due to functionality, but that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be functional at all. Users should be able to recieve immediate, meaningful responses to their actions, not a frustrating mess.