The Design Of Everyday Things

The Design Of Everyday Things helps you understand why your inability to use some products isn’t your fault but instead is the result of bad design and how companies can use cognitive psychology to actually solve our problems without creating more of them.

Have you ever tried to set something new up, like a TV remote, but been quickly frustrated when you can’t understand the instructions? You probably thought you were the problem when the problem was just bad design.

Bad design is what happens when creators neglect the relationship between technology and the people who use it. Good design brings these two things together.

Many people struggle with a TV remote. The reason isn’t that none of them is intuitive. The real reason is that the makers of TV remotes often want to make them compatible with as many things as possible, such as a BluRay player, gaming consoles, or sounds systems. The designers cram far too many buttons and options on them to connect with all these things, making them hard to figure out.

One of the main reasons we get bad technology in today’s world is rapidly changing technology. Just think about cell phone in the last fifteen or so years—- they’ve gone from brick flip phones to an all in one touch screen device that makes calls, stream videos, surfs the internet, and more. While it’s great that our phones can do more, they’ve also become excessively complicated.

Technology is changing at such a rapid pace that it is getting increasingly difficult to make new products that are still easy to use. Designers need to remember that if a design is too complicated to use, it will be useless to a consumer.

The home store IKEA has been notorious in the past for selling products that are hard to set up at home. But nowadays, they have become actually quite simple. It takes a bit of time, but you can usually set up your own dresser in an hour or two without too much trouble. This is partly because IKEA uses what’s known as constraints. Constraints are limits that direct how to use a product. An example of a physical constraint in IKEA’s case is that they provide you with different sized nuts and bolts that only fit into a specific equal-sized hole. Because there is only one place each but can go, this makes assembly much easier. Another way to help consumers is by using cultural constraints. An example of this is that virtually every screw you could ever buy tightens by turning right and loosens by turning left. We might take this for granted, but think about how much easier it is to use…