Author: Don Norman
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One of the greatest frustrations of all is trying to learn how to do something that seems completely arbitrary and capricious.
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A good conceptual model can make the difference between successful and erroneous operation of the many devices in our lives. This short lesson on conceptual models points out that good design is also an act of communication between the designer and the user, except that all the communication has to come about by the appearance of the device itself. The device must explain itself. Even
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A good conceptual model can make the difference between successful and erroneous operation of the many devices in our lives.
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In design, it is important to show the effect of an action. Without feedback, one is always wondering whether anything has happened.
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The surest way to make something easy to use, with few errors, is to make it impossible to do otherwise—to constrain the choices.
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Failure to design with constraints is one reason for all those warnings and attempts to give instructions:
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Rule of thumb: when instructions have to be pasted on something (push here, insert this way turn off before doing this), it is badly designed.
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A good designer makes sure that appropriate actions are perceptible and inappropriate ones invisible.
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Observe yourself. Observe others. As the famous baseball player Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot by watching.”