Paul T Cottey's blog

I talked about the last 1% of a design making all the different.  Let me pick up with another couple thoughts on design principles:  Good user interfaces are intuitive to your target users.

Go pick up a copy of The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. It is not fine literature, but it is probably worth $11.53 on Amazon.  The library might even have it. It talks about usability and other things. I read it a number of years ago, and although Norman sometimes sells past the sale, it is generally interesting.

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I have to interrupt my series of design guidelines to reference this comparison between the Commodore 64 and the Apple iPhone.  I was an Apple ][e guy, or, actually, a Franklin Ace 1200 guy, but seeing the old “Vic 64′s,” as I taunted my friends who had them, brought make memories.  Actually, what it did is made me think that there are classic designs which can stand the test of time.  I am not going to geek out and defend the Commodore 64 as a classic, but I am going to say that there are certainly elements of design in the 1980s personal computers that have stood the test of time.

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Quick.  Easy.  Painless.  Everything should be like this.

I just wrote about the last 1% of a design making all the difference.  And instead of entering into a related screed, I figured I would introduce another design principle.  I call it:  ”Inanimate objects should retain their state.” It has a related axiom of “Something I didn’t ask you to do for me is not a favor.”  I’ll get to that.  If you were to set down your Starbucks on the desk, intending to get back to it in a minute for another sip, and it instead emptied itself out and threw itself away, you’d probably be annoyed.We I generally expect objects to stay where I put them AND I expect them to stay in the state in which I left them.  A coffee cup throwing itself away is absurd, you say, yet we allow car doors to lock and unlock themselves without checking with us. (more…)

I had a rental car the other week, and it got me thinking about design principles.  The driver’s-side visor did not have the little plastic tab that pulls out another three inches or so, so the sun was often coming in right past the edge of the visor. The reset button for the trip odometer was nowhere to be found. The turn signal indicator couldn’t decide whether to engage the brights, the wipers, or just signal left or right when I touched it. You get the point. So what? (more…)