How natural and enjoyable user experience will be when product itself acts as a user manual. Appearance and structure of the product should convey the purpose, guide users about the possible actions and how to perform them. Users have effortless product interaction, when the design emphasizes understandability and usability.
Looking at a new product, user should be able to discover
What are the possible actions to do?
Where to perform the actions?
How to perform the actions?
This discoverability can be achieved by following Don Norman's design principles from his book "The Design of Everyday Things". In this article, I have referred LinkedIn features as examples for the principles.
Affordance determines how an application can be used. Affordance is a relationship between properties of an application and capabilities of the interacting person.
In LinkedIn the affordances, Like, Comment and Share icons convey the actions that users can perform on an article. These affordances will be identified by almost all users without requiring any user instructions.
Sometime affordances can't be directly identified. For example, LinkedIn Learning allows only the premium subscribers to watch priced courses. This affordance determines how the Linkedin Learning can be used by different users. Users won't be knowing this until they read LinkedIn user terms or until they try to watch the priced courses.
Signifiers communicate where and how the possible actions can be performed. Highlighted icons in below picture signal where and how the Like, comment and share actions can be performed on this article. User can express like opinion, write comment or share the article by clicking the icons. Signifiers should be perceivable indicators.
Feedbacks acknowledge the users action and communicate the results of an action. Notice the "Thumbs up" icon in left and right images. After I Like the article, color is changed from white to blue communicating the result of my action.
Mapping the application controls such that they reflect the way they behave, or the results achieved by using them. "Add Connection" control indicates that click on this, will add a person as new connection. Natural mapping is followed by placing one control against each person showing which person will be added while clicking "Add Connection" control.
Constraints limit what appropriate actions can be performed by the user. When I click on post without typing any text, application doesn't perform the action. This constraint ensures that action post will be successful only after adding the text.
After reading about these design principles, started observing the products to identify which of these principles are considered in their design. LinkedIn features that I have quoted as examples are those that are inline with the design principles. I also want to share my observations from products that aren't lined up with my expectation or understanding as an user.
First time when I looked at new Whatsapp feature "Status", I was expecting to see my contacts current status like "available to chat", "In home town" ,"Busy" etc. I was surprised to see my contacts had images (Photos, Quotes etc) and video clips which didn't convey their status. "Status" as an Affordance, I was expecting to convey the status of my contacts based on which I can decide my next action with them. If this feature has been labeled something like "Share" or "Fast Share", then I might have expected my contacts to share their images, video's, quotes etc through this new feature without changing their profile picture.
On clicking "My Status" button I was expecting to enter my status but my camera got enabled. As Signifier "My Status" button indicated where to perform action but didn't perform the expected action. My suggestion will be to have the button label as "My video/image status" and change the button icon something like camera.
In Whatsapp many times I identify my regular contacts looking at their profile image with least attention to their names. Now status image/video is also shown in the circle format like the profile image. My contacts using different images for profile and status, has created confusion with the one to one mapping that existed with their profile image and name.
Knowing these design principles from Don Norman's book "The Design of Everyday Things", has enabled my conscious observation about the daily use products and their features. I am able to infer why I use few products with great passion and many with less passion. This book is also helping to choose correct products to accomplish the daily tasks.
This article can also be viewed from my LinkedIn .
No comments:
Post a Comment