When Norman was talking throughout the reading about frustrations with design, the first thought that popped into my head was the very complex, ‘interactive’ online shopping sites. I put ‘interactive’ in quotation marks as the design lags, which takes away the whole point of the experience, and I feel like they value aesthetic more than they do user experience. As a user, I’m just trying to look for clothes. Why are you making it so complicated for me? When Norman began to explain HCD, I remembered the workflow of the company I interned at this summer, used for their development department. The company was in charge of an Enterprise Resource Planning system. Suppose you’re a client and you raise a ticket. The ticket goes through Presales, then Analysis, where the time for the development is estimated, and the business need is highlighted by a functional consultant, finally it’s picked up by a developer. After the code is done and reviewed, it’s pushed to functional testing before it goes to the client. Through this flow, it ensures the code is fully tested for the client, which means the probability of the client having errors is minimized.
In terms of applying the author’s principles to Interactive Media, I think especially as we are learning the technology (like p5js), it’s very easy to lose track of the aesthetics and forget about user experience. There’s a sacrifice to be made, or maybe a balance to be found between prioritizing user experience over aesthetics, but aesthetics is part of the user experience as well. Let’s take websites, for example, the likelihood of wanting to use a poorly decorated website is slim; it may work perfectly, but it wouldn’t look appealing. At the other end of the spectrum is the example I gave earlier, where aesthetics completely take over and the user experience is no longer enjoyable.