After completing the reading, I now have a better understanding of the factors that go into making an everyday product. I will admit, the more I read, the more overwhelmed I got as the requirements needed to make a useful and understandable product became more extensive. I never thought about all the different components that go into design and how different perspectives and cultures can also have an impact. One thing that personally drives me crazy is my oven back at home. It is a newer model and therefore has many features that are not directly visible. Me and my mom only know how to change the temperature and where the heat comes from (up, down, up and down, etc). However, there is a QR code on the side of the oven with a manual that is 30 pages long with all the different settings you can turn on. Some of these involve holding different buttons, rotating a wheel, etc. It is very confusing! Every time I wanna use it I end up scanning the QR code to read the manual.
Consequently, this has got me thinking about how whether or not my assignments are easy to understand and interact with. For this weeks assignment, I recreated mysk’s menu. It is displayed on the screen where the user can hover over different menu items. If they click on it, the menu will slide down revealing food on the table. If they click on the menu again (in the bottom left corner of the screen) it will slide back up. I will admit, unless you read my blog post or this reading response, you may not know how to navigate through the artwork. However, I think my work allows for ‘discoverability’ like Norman mentions. If the user simply moves the mouse across the screen, they will see that the menu items enlarge (signifier for the affordance) when hovered over. Hence, they would then try clicking on it which results in the sliding menu. What I think is less intuitive is how to display the menu on the screen again. This is a discoverability failure because there is no signifier indicating that the menu can be reopened by clicking it. Unlike the hover-enlarge cue for individual items, there is no visible signal that the closed menu remains interactive. However, I think after multiple tries, the user would eventually think to click on the menu again which reveals it. But this has definitely got me thinking as to how I can develop my future work.