Norman’s article was a great read, and he definitely captured my attention by being so frustrated over “Norman Doors,” which is something I only started to relate to once I got onto campus here. The automated doors in C2 were not automated at all just last year, despite its big bold yellow and black efforts to flex its automation. Further into last school year, it began to actually automate, and so did D2’s. Only, D2’s doors are so poorly designed that I end up using all of my strength to fight with the door’s pressure, and at times, the door would be open and would close on me as I’m walking through it. Don’t underestimate how strong that thing is!!
These automated doors lack discoverability, where they have such slow and random responses to your actions that it ends up overcomplicating such a simple concept. The doors won’t start to open until you’ve been standing there awkwardly for 5 seconds, and once you start to reach out your arm to manually open the door, that’s when it suddenly decides to get moving. It could be improved by having a faster response rate, and by actually opening when someone “waves to open.” Just like Norman’s story about his friend with the swinging doors, the doors’ discoverability failed and was unnecessarily complex. This, as Norman mentioned, applies to a lot of modern day technology that has too many functions and controls for you to remember, and they’re usually meant as advertisement to show off that this one device can do this many things… even if some of those functions are never played out even once. This reminds me a lot of the piece we read last week on interactivity, where companies slap on “interactive” onto their products to grab customer attention. Similar concept applies here with all of these supposedly everyday friendly machines’ different functions.
Something that drives me crazy is the elevator in A2C. One of the elevators is “locked” for maintenance to go down to the basement, but NYUAD students can still use it if they swipe their card. However, I’ve fallen victim to many cases of elevator confusion. I swipe my card, the elevator goes from B2 to 2 (ground floor for dorms), and I walk in, only for the elevator to go back down to B2. Then, some maintenance people click on 2. Rather than stopping at 2 for maintenance, it suddenly decides to follow my choice to go up to the seventh floor, now inconveniencing the worker. Something so simple ends up being extremely frustrating, and it becomes all the more nerve wracking when it becomes the determining factor over whether you’ll be late or on time to a class or a meeting. It could be improved with some signifiers that indicates floor priority so both parties can know what’s coming ahead. There should also be better signifiers on swiping your card to unlock the elevator, since some buildings have a poster while others don’t. I didn’t know I could do that until well into my first semester of Freshman year. Feedback would also be helpful, where some visual (colors) or auditory feedback could be given to indicate where the elevator is properly responding to your swipe, or if it will just ignore you. The whole problem could also be resolved by adding more elevators!
Norman’s principles of design can be applied to Interactive Media by making the designs of our project discoverable and accessible. In order to achieve this, we should follow human-centered-design, an approach that prioritizes human needs, capabilities, and behavior first, then is designed to match and accommodate those needs, capabilities, and ways of behaving. With strong understandings of psychology and technology as well as good machine to person communication, it would be easier to create an actual good design that performs well when it’s functioning as it should, but also knows how to perform well when it faces inevitable problems and issues. But while doing this for Interactive Media, it’s important to create a balance between the design navigation, the simplicity of how the project actually functions, and the aesthetics. Too much of one or all things can easily get very overwhelming for the user especially when it comes to IM projects that are supposed to be lighthearted and fun. By making designs simple and straightforward, with any affordances, signifiers, and/or feedback when necessary, it’ll be easier for the user to understand what to do and why they must do so. This focus on machine-user communication will makes things a lot more comprehensible