The Design of Everyday Things Read online

  TABLE 1.1.The Role of HCD and Design Specializations

  Experience design

  These are areas of focus

  Industrial design

  Interaction design

  Human-centered design

  The process that ensures that the designs match the needs and capabilities of the people for whom they are intended

  Human-centered design is a design philosophy. It means starting with a good understanding of people and the needs that the design is intended to meet. This understanding comes about primarily through observation, for people themselves are often unaware of their true needs, even unaware of the difficulties they are encountering. Getting the specification of the thing to be defined is one of the most difficult parts of the design, so much so that the HCD principle is to avoid specifying the problem as long as possible but instead to iterate upon repeated approximations. This is done through rapid tests of ideas, and after each test modifying the approach and the problem definition. The results can be products that truly meet the needs of people. Doing HCD within the rigid time, budget, and other constraints of industry can be a challenge: Chapter 6 examines these issues.

  Where does HCD fit into the earlier discussion of the several different forms of design, especially the areas called industrial, interaction, and experience design? These are all compatible. HCD is a philosophy and a set of procedures, whereas the others are areas of focus (see Table 1.1). The philosophy and procedures of HCD add deep consideration and study of human needs to the design process, whatever the product or service, whatever the major focus.

  Fundamental Principles of Interaction

  Great designers produce pleasurable experiences. Experience: note the word. Engineers tend not to like it; it is too subjective. But when I ask them about their favorite automobile or test equipment, they will smile delightedly as they discuss the fit and finish, the sensation of power during acceleration, their ease of control while shifting or steering, or the wonderful feel of the knobs and switches on the instrument. Those are experiences.

  Experience is critical, for it determines how fondly people remember their interactions. Was the overall experience positive, or was it frustrating and confusing? When our home technology behaves in an uninterpretable fashion we can become confused, frustrated, and even angry—all strong negative emotions. When there is understanding it can lead to a feeling of control, of mastery, and of satisfaction or even pride—all strong positive emotions. Cognition and emotion are tightly intertwined, which means that the designers must design with both in mind.

  When we interact with a product, we need to figure out how to work it. This means discovering what it does, how it works, and what operations are possible: discoverability. Discoverability results from appropriate application of five fundamental psychological concepts covered in the next few chapters: affordances, signifiers, constraints, mappings, and feedback. But there is a sixth principle, perhaps most important of all: the conceptual model of the system. It is the conceptual model that provides true understanding. So I now turn to these fundamental principles, starting with affordances, signifiers, mappings, and feedback, then moving to conceptual models. Constraints are covered in Chapters 3 and 4.

  AFFORDANCES

  We live in a world filled with objects, many natural, the rest artificial. Every day we encounter thousands of objects, many of them new to us. Many of the new objects are similar to ones we already know, but many are unique, yet we manage quite well. How do we do this? Why is it that when we encounter many unusual natural objects, we know how to interact with them? Why is this true with many of the artificial, human-made objects we encounter? The answer lies with a few basic principles. Some of the most important of these principles come from a consideration of affordances.

  The term affordance refers to the relationship between a physical object and a person (or for that matter, any interacting agent, whether animal or human, or even machines and robots). An affordance is a relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used. A chair affords (“is for”) support and, therefore, affords sitting. Most chairs can also be carried by a single person (they afford lifting), but some can only be lifted by a strong person or by a team of people. If young or relatively weak people cannot lift a chair, then for these people, the chair does not have that affordance, it does not afford lifting.

  The presence of an affordance is jointly determined by the qualities of the object and the abilities of the agent that is interacting. This relational definition of affordance gives considerable difficulty to many people. We are used to thinking that properties are associated with objects. But affordance is not a property. An affordance is a relationship. Whether an affordance exists depends upon the properties of both the object and the agent.

  Glass affords transparency. At the same time, its physical structure blocks the passage of most physical objects. As a result, glass affords seeing through and support, but not the passage of air or most physical objects (atomic particles can pass through glass). The blockage of passage can be considered an anti-affordance—the prevention of interaction. To be effective, affordances and anti-affordances have to be discoverable—perceivable. This poses a difficulty with glass. The reason we like glass is its relative invisibility, but this aspect, so useful in the normal window, also hides its anti-affordance property of blocking passage. As a result, birds often try to fly through windows. And every year, numerous people injure themselves when they walk (or run) through closed glass doors or large picture windows. If an affordance or anti-affordance cannot be perceived, some means of signaling its presence is required: I call this property a signifier (discussed in the next section).

  The notion of affordance and the insights it provides originated with J. J. Gibson, an eminent psychologist who provided many advances to our understanding of human perception. I had interacted with him over many years, sometimes in formal conferences and seminars, but most fruitfully over many bottles of beer, late at night, just talking. We disagreed about almost everything. I was an engineer who became a cognitive psychologist, trying to understand how the mind works. He started off as a Gestalt psychologist, but then developed an approach that is today named after him: Gibsonian psychology, an ecological approach to perception. He argued that the world contained the clues and that people simply picked them up through “direct perception.” I argued that nothing could be direct: the brain had to process the information arriving at the sense organs to put together a coherent interpretation. “Nonsense,” he loudly proclaimed; “it requires no interpretation: it is directly perceived.” And then he would put his hand to his ears, and with a triumphant flourish, turn off his hearing aids: my counterarguments would fall upon deaf ears—literally.

  When I pondered my question—how do people know how to act when confronted with a novel situation—I realized that a large part of the answer lay in Gibson’s work. He pointed out that all the senses work together, that we pick up information about the world by the combined result of all of them. “Information pickup” was one of his favorite phrases, and Gibson believed that the combined information picked up by all of our sensory apparatus—sight, sound, smell, touch, balance, kinesthetic, acceleration, body position— determines our perceptions without the need for internal processing or cognition. Although he and I disagreed about the role played by the brain’s internal processing, his brilliance was in focusing attention on the rich amount of information present in the world. Moreover, the physical objects conveyed important information about how people could interact with them, a property he named “affordance.”

  Affordances exist even if they are not visible. For designers, their visibility is critical: visible affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. A flat plate mounted on a door affords pushing. Knobs afford turning, pushing, and pulling. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. Perceived affordances help peo
ple figure out what actions are possible without the need for labels or instructions. I call the signaling component of affordances signifiers.

  SIGNIFIERS

  Are affordances important to designers? The first edition of this book introduced the term affordances to the world of design. The design community loved the concept and affordances soon propagated into the instruction and writing about design. I soon found mention of the term everywhere. Alas, the term became used in ways that had nothing to do with the original.

  Many people find affordances difficult to understand because they are relationships, not properties. Designers deal with fixed properties, so there is a temptation to say that the property is an affordance. But that is not the only problem with the concept of affordances.

  Designers have practical problems. They need to know how to design things to make them understandable. They soon discovered that when working with the graphical designs for electronic displays, they needed a way to designate which parts could be touched, slid upward, downward, or sideways, or tapped upon. The actions could be done with a mouse, stylus, or fingers. Some systems responded to body motions, gestures, and spoken words, with no touching of any physical device. How could designers describe what they were doing? There was no word that fit, so they took the closest existing word—affordance. Soon designers were saying such things as, “I put an affordance there,” to describe why they displayed a circle on a screen to indicate where the person should touch, whether by mouse or by finger. “No,” I said, “that is not an affordance. That is a way of communicating where the touch should be. You are communicating where to do the touching: the affordance of touching exists on the entire screen: you are trying to signify where the touch should take place. That’s not the same thing as saying what action is possible.”

  Not only did my explanation fail to satisfy the design community, but I myself was unhappy. Eventually I gave up: designers needed a word to describe what they were doing, so they chose affordance. What alternative did they have? I decided to provide a better answer: signifiers. Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where the action should take place. We need both.

  People need some way of understanding the product or service they wish to use, some sign of what it is for, what is happening, and what the alternative actions are. People search for clues, for any sign that might help them cope and understand. It is the sign that is important, anything that might signify meaningful information. Designers need to provide these clues. What people need, and what designers must provide, are signifiers. Good design requires, among other things, good communication of the purpose, structure, and operation of the device to the people who use it. That is the role of the signifier.

  The term signifier has had a long and illustrious career in the exotic field of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols. But just as I appropriated affordance to use in design in a manner somewhat different than its inventor had intended, I use signifier in a somewhat different way than it is used in semiotics. For me, the term signifier refers to any mark or sound, any perceivable indicator that communicates appropriate behavior to a person.

  Signifiers can be deliberate and intentional, such as the sign PUSH on a door, but they may also be accidental and unintentional, such as our use of the visible trail made by previous people walking through a field or over a snow-covered terrain to determine the best path. Or how we might use the presence or absence of people waiting at a train station to determine whether we have missed the train. (I explain these ideas in more detail in my book Living with Complexity.)

  FIGURE 1.2.Problem Doors: Signifiers Are Needed. Door hardware can signal whether to push or pull without signs, but the hardware of the two doors in the upper photo, A, are identical even though one should be pushed, the other pulled. The flat, ribbed horizontal bar has the obvious perceived affordance of pushing, but as the signs indicate, the door on the left is to be pulled, the one on the right is to be pushed. In the bottom pair of photos, B and C, there are no visible signifiers or affordances. How does one know which side to push? Trial and error. When external signifiers—signs— have to be added to something as simple as a door, it indicates bad design. (Photographs by the author.)

  The signifier is an important communication device to the recipient, whether or not communication was intended. It doesn’t matter whether the useful signal was deliberately placed or whether it is incidental: there is no necessary distinction. Why should it matter whether a flag was placed as a deliberate clue to wind direction (as is done at airports or on the masts of sailboats) or was there as an advertisement or symbol of pride in one’s country (as is done on public buildings). Once I interpret a flag’s motion to indicate wind direction, it does not matter why it was placed there.

  Consider a bookmark, a deliberately placed signifier of one’s place in reading a book. But the physical nature of books also makes a bookmark an accidental signifier, for its placement also indicates how much of the book remains. Most readers have learned to use this accidental signifier to aid in their enjoyment of the reading. With few pages left, we know the end is near. And if the reading is torturous, as in a school assignment, one can always console oneself by knowing there are “only a few more pages to get through.” Electronic book readers do not have the physical structure of paper books, so unless the software designer deliberately provides a clue, they do not convey any signal about the amount of text remaining.

  FIGURE 1.3.Sliding Doors: Seldom Done Well. Sliding doors are seldom signified properly. The top two photographs show the sliding door to the toilet on an Amtrak train in the United States. The handle clearly signifies “pull,” but in fact, it needs to be rotated and the door slid to the right. The owner of the store in Shanghai, China, Photo C, solved the problem with a sign. “DON’T PUSH!” it says, in both English and Chinese. Amtrak’s toilet door could have used a similar kind of sign. (Photographs by the author.)

  Whatever their nature, planned or accidental, signifiers provide valuable clues as to the nature of the world and of social activities. For us to function in this social, technological world, we need to develop internal models of what things mean, of how they operate. We seek all the clues we can find to help in this enterprise, and in this way, we are detectives, searching for whatever guidance we might find. If we are fortunate, thoughtful designers provide the clues for us. Otherwise, we must use our own creativity and imagination.

  FIGURE 1.4.The Sink That Would Not Drain: Where Signifiers Fail. I washed my hands in my hotel sink in London, but then, as shown in Photo A, was left with the question of how to empty the sink of the dirty water. I searched all over for a control: none. I tried prying open the sink stopper with a spoon (Photo B): failure. I finally left my hotel room and went to the front desk to ask for instructions. (Yes, I actually did.) “Push down on the stopper,” I was told. Yes, it worked (Photos C and D). But how was anyone to ever discover this? And why should I have to put my clean hands back into the dirty water to empty the sink? The problem here is not just the lack of signifier, it is the faulty decision to produce a stopper that requires people to dirty their clean hands to use it. (Photographs by the author.)

  Affordances, perceived affordances, and signifiers have much in common, so let me pause to ensure that the distinctions are clear.

  Affordances represent the possibilities in the world for how an agent (a person, animal, or machine) can interact with something. Some affordances are perceivable, others are invisible. Signifiers are signals. Some signifiers are signs, labels, and drawings placed in the world, such as the signs labeled “push,” “pull,” or “exit” on doors, or arrows and diagrams indicating what is to be acted upon or in which direction to gesture, or other instructions. Some signifiers are simply the perceived affordances, such as the handle of a door or the physical structure of a switch. Note that some perceived affordances may not be real: they may look like doors or places to push, or an impediment to entry, when in fact they are not. Th
ese are misleading signifiers, oftentimes accidental but sometimes purposeful, as when trying to keep people from doing actions for which they are not qualified, or in games, where one of the challenges is to figure out what is real and what is not.

  FIGURE 1.5.Accidental Affordances Can Become Strong Signifiers. This wall, at the Industrial Design department of KAIST, in Korea, provides an anti-affordance, preventing people from falling down the stair shaft. Its top is flat, an accidental by-product of the design. But flat surfaces afford support, and as soon as one person discovers it can be used to dispose of empty drink containers, the discarded container becomes a signifier, telling others that it is permissible to discard their items there. (Photographs by the author.)

  My favorite example of a misleading signifier is a row of vertical pipes across a service road that I once saw in a public park. The pipes obviously blocked cars and trucks from driving on that road: they were good examples of anti-affordances. But to my great surprise, I saw a park vehicle simply go through the pipes. Huh? I walked over and examined them: the pipes were made of rubber, so vehicles could simply drive right over them. A very clever signifier, signaling a blocked road (via an apparent anti-affordance) to the average person, but permitting passage for those who knew.

  To summarize:

  •Affordances are the possible interactions between people and the environment. Some affordances are perceivable, others are not.