Design of Everyday Things - Norman, Don [84]
Let me be positive for a change: there are science museums and exhibits that work well. The science museums in Boston and in Toronto, the Monterey Aquarium, the Exploratorium in San Francisco. There are probably many others that I do not know about. Consider the Exploratorium. It is dark and grungy on the outside, located in a remodeled, left-over building. Very little is devoted to sleekness or aesthetics. The emphasis is on using and understanding the exhibits. The staff is interested in explaining things.
It is possible to do things right. Just don’t let the focus on cost, or durability, or aesthetics destroy the major point of the museum: to be used, to be understood. The problem of focus, I call this.
DESIGNERS ARE NOT TYPICAL USERS
Designers often think of themselves as typical users. After all, they are people too, and they are often users of their own designs. Why don’t they notice, why don’t they have the same problems as the rest of us? The designers I have spoken with are thoughtful, concerned people. They do want to do things properly. Why, then, are so many failing?
All of us develop an everyday psychology—professionals call it “folk psychology” or, sometimes, “naive psychology”—and it can be as erroneous and misleading as the naive physics that we examined in chapter 2. Worse, actually. As human beings, we have access to our conscious thoughts and beliefs but not to our subconscious ones. Conscious thoughts are often rationalizations of behavior, explanations after the fact. We tend to project our own rationalizations and beliefs onto the actions and beliefs of others. But the professional should be able to realize that human belief and behavior are complex and that the individual is in no position to discover all the relevant factors. There is no substitute for interaction with and study of actual users of a proposed design.
“Steve Wozniak, the whiz-kid co-founder of Apple Computer offered the first public glimpse of CORE, his latest brainchild.
“CORE, which stands for controller of remote electronics, is a single device that allows consumers to fully operate their home equipment by remote control as long as the equipment is all in one room....
“CORE comes with a 40-page user manual. But Wozniak says users of his gizmo ... won’t be daunted because, initially, most will be ‘techies.’”13
There is a big difference between the expertise required to be a designer and that required to be a user. In their work, designers often become expert with the device they are designing. Users are often expert at the task they are trying to perform with the device.14
Steve Wozniak designs a device to help people like himself, people who complain that their house is cluttered with too many remote control devices for their electronic components. So he produces a single controller that replaces the many. But the task is complex, the instruction manual thick. Not a problem, we are told, the initial users will be “techies.” Just like Wozniak, presumably. But how accurate is that characterization? Do we even know that the technically ambitious, the “techies,” will really be able to understand and use the device? The only way to find out is to test the designs on users—people as similar to the eventual purchaser of the product as possible. Furthermore, the designer’s interaction with potential users must take place from the very beginning of the design process, for it soon becomes too late to make fundamental changes.
Professional designers are usually aware of the pitfalls. But most design is not done by professional designers, it is done by engineers, programmers, and managers. One designer described the issues to me this way:
“People, generally engineers or managers, tend to feel that they are humans, therefore they can design something for other humans just as well as the trained interface expert. It’s really interesting to watch engineers and computer scientists go about designing a product. They argue and argue about how to do things, generally