Review

This book has changed how I see the world. I’ve always been interested, amused and sometimes annoyed by bad design. Now I see it everywhere.

By focusing on the very fundamentals of design - I’ve found this book to be consistently and endlessly applicable to work and life.

The concept of affordances progressed my understanding of accessibility. Thinking about conceptual models helps me grapple with product messaging. Learning about feedback has left me dumfounded that the button to call my elevator proudly sounds before the press has actually been registered. You have to push a little harder to actually call the lift 🤯

Developing a shared vocabulary - to talk about these concepts with my colleagues in design has helped accelerate day to day product conversations.

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Book Review and Summary: Think Like an Architect by Hal Box

Get a comprehensive review and summary of the best-selling book "Think Like an Architect" by Hal Box, the renowned architect and educator. Learn about the key principles and practices of design thinking and problem-solving, based on Box's own experience and insights.

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Testing with Humans

This book serves a healthy reminder that most Product Teams spend too much time building and shipping features. Exploratory testing gives us a chance to validate our assumptions before we commit to building. This book only scratches the surface of exploratory testing, but it's a good introduction, and I recommend it to people getting into product management.

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Design Systems

This book makes a fair attempt at documenting the process of how to make a successful design system. I feel there's still room for 'the definitive Design System book'. I can't bring myself to recommend this one, despite it being the best text I've found.

andrewclark.co.uk

Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• Norman doors (named after the author) are doors that don’t open the way you expect.
• An affordance: A capability made possible by the relationship between the human and the object.
• A signifier: Anything that communicates the purpose, structure or operation of a device to a user
• Mapping: How controls and displays map back to actions and intended results
• Feedback: How the system lets you know a request is being worked on, or is complete
• Conceptual models: A simplified understanding of how something works
• The Technology Paradox: Technology has potential to make life easier and more enjoyable. At the same time it risks adding complexity, increasing difficulty and frustrating the user.
• The Design Challenge: Different disciplines (engineering, marketing, operations) often have different priorities (scalability, reliability, price, differentiation, production). The design challenge is to bring everyone together, to build a product that customers love.
• 7 Stages of action:
• Form the goal
• Plan the action
• Specify an action sequence
• Perform the action sequence
• Perceive the state of the world
• Interpret the perception
• Compare the outcome with the goal
• 7 Fundamental design principles
1. Discoverability. Determining what actions are possible and the current state
2. Feedback. Full & continuous info about the current state. Particularly after actions.
3. Conceptual models. Invoke a model of the system that enhances discoverability and evaluation
4. Affordances. The proper affordances exist to make the desired actions possible
5. Signifiers. Ensure affordances are perceived, increasing discoverability & evaluation
6. Mappings. Make the relationship between controls and actions predictable
7. Constraints. Trim possible actions, to ease interpretation. Physical, logical, semantic & cultural.
• Usability is often not prioritised in the purchasing process especially when the purchaser ≠ user.
• 4 Classes of Constraints:
• Physical limitations to the possible operations.
• Cultural. Cultures have a set of allowable actions
• Semantic: Only certain combinations make sense.
• Logical constraint. There is a logical relationship between the spatial or functional layout of components and the things that they affect. E.g If take something apart, put it back together again, and there's a part left on the table. You know you've made a mistake.

• The Forcing Function Tradeoff: Make it too annoying and people will try to disable it. So minimise the nuisance value whilst retaining the safety feature.
• Consistency in design is virtuous. People are great at transfer learning (lessons learned with one system transfer readily to others). On the whole, consistency is to be followed.
• Skeuomorphic: incorporating old familiar ideas into new technologies, even though they no longer play a functional role.
• Key Design Principles
• Put information in the environment → Reduce the burden of needing endogenous knowledge.
• Allow for efficient operations when people have learned the requirements
• Use environmental knowledge to make it easier for non-experts. This will help infrequent journeys and infrequent users
• Leverage natural and artificial constraints: physical, logical, semantic and cultural.
• Exploit the power of forcing functions and natural mappings
• Bridge the gulf of execution and the gulf of evaluation.
• Make things visible, both for executions and evaluation
• One the execution side, provide the feedforward information: make the options readily available.
• On the evaluation side: make the results of each action apparent.
• Make it possible to determine the system's status readily, easily, accurately and in a form consistent with the person's goals, plans, and expectations.
• Embrace errors. Seek to understand their causes and ensure they don't happen again. Re-design don't reprimand
• Depth and Breadth Research Tradeoff. Design research is deep insight on a small number of people, Market research is shallow insight on a large number of people.
• There is no such thing as the average person
• Complexity is OK. Confusion is bad.
• Design is successful only if the product is successful (purchased, used and enjoyed). Design should pay attention to the total experience and the total lifecycle. Design should be concerned with function, usability and understandability.

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Fundamental Principles of Interaction

• The system image: When the system design meets the user interaction. We should be designing thinking about the interaction. Communication is an important part of design, good conceptual models can help.
• The Technology Paradox: Technology has potential to make life easier and more enjoyable. At the same time it risks adding complexity, increasing difficulty and frustrating the user.
• The Design Challenge: Different disciplines (engineering, marketing, operations) often have different priorities (scalability, reliability, price, differentiation, production). The design challenge is to bring everyone together, to build a product that customers love.

Goals and Actions

• A Goal can be nested in a hierarchy of goals. UXR interviews and root cause analysis are good at identifying goal hierarchies.
• Often a single pass of the 7 stages of action won't be enough to complete a goal (multiple subgoals or loops are required).
• Action cycles can be triggered in service of achieving an overarching goal, or by an event relating to a lower-level goal or task.
• Some goals are opportunistic - when behaviour takes advantage of circumstance. Typically less precise and certain. Less effort and less inconvenience.
• Reconsidering the goals of a user can result in new product categories and innovation

Fundamental Design Principles

1. Discoverability. Determining what actions are possible and the current state
2. Feedback. Full & continuous info about the current state. Particularly after actions.
3. Conceptual models. Invoke a model of the system that enhances discoverability and evaluation
4. Affordances. The proper affordances exist to make the desired actions possible
5. Signifiers. Ensure affordances are perceived, increasing discoverability & evaluation
6. Mappings. Make the relationship between controls and actions predictable
7. Constraints. Trim possible actions, to ease interpretation. Physical, logical, semantic & cultural.

• When users take inappropriate actions. Ask which of 7 stages of action does it fail? Which design principles are deficient? Most interactions with products are actually with a complex system, good design requires consideration of the entire system.

• Usability is often not prioritised in the purchasing process especially when the purchaser ≠ user.
• Cultural mappings can differ. Cultural mappings can change over time. Apple changed the default scrolling direction when it introduced touch devices.
• It is possible to break convention and switch metaphors, but expect a period of confusion until people adapt.

Constraints Discoverability and Feedback

• Environmental knowledge (perceived affordances, signifiers, mapping, constraints) and Endogenous knowledge (conceptual models, constraints, similarities to other situations we've face) help us operate things we haven't seen before.
• Designers should provide critical key information to the user in the environment.

Constraints, Conventions and Behaviour

Constraints can guide and force behaviour. They’re a key part of Safety engineering:

• The Forcing Function Tradeoff: Make it too annoying and people will try to disable it. So minimise the nuisance value whilst retaining the safety feature.
• Conventions can help a user go from perception of an affordance to understanding.
• A doorknob has a graspability affordance, but the cultural convention is what helps understand we can open doors with them.
• Conventions are cultural constraints - they can be different across cultures.
• Going against a convention is difficult. People often object and complain if they have to relearn (e.g. the metric system). Just because something is different doesn't mean it's bad, if we never made changes we could never improve.
• Consistency in design is virtuous. People are great at transfer learning (lessons learned with one system transfer readily to others). On the whole, consistency is to be followed.
• Avoid mixed systems, they’re confusing. If there is to be a change - everybody has to change

• The principle of desperation: If all else fails, standardise. When everything else fails, design all things the same way, so people only have to learn once. Standards simplify design for everyone, but they tend to hinder future development.

• Skeuomorphic: incorporating old familiar ideas into new technologies, even though they no longer play a functional role.

Designing for Errors

Key Design Principles

• Put information in the environment → Reduce the burden of needing endogenous knowledge.
• Allow for efficient operations when people have learned the requirements
• Use environmental knowledge to make it easier for non-experts. This will help infrequent journeys and infrequent users
• Leverage natural and artificial constraints: physical, logical, semantic and cultural.
• Exploit the power of forcing functions and natural mappings
• Bridge the gulf of execution and the gulf of evaluation.
• Make things visible, both for executions and evaluation
• One the execution side, provide the feedforward information: make the options readily available.
• On the evaluation side: make the results of each action apparent.
• Make it possible to determine the system's status readily, easily, accurately and in a form consistent with the person's goals, plans, and expectations.
• Embrace errors. Seek to understand their causes and ensure they don't happen again. Re-design don't reprimand

Design Thinking

• Task: A lower-level component of an activity
• Activity: A collected set of tasks, all performed together to meet some goal.
• Align your design to an activity gives the user motivation/ a reason to use your product
• The complexity needs to be proportional to the task

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is

The day a product-development process starts, it's behind schedule and above budget (Don Norman's law of product development)

Design in the World of Business

Design is successful only if the product is successful (purchased, used and enjoyed). Design should pay attention to the total experience and the total lifecycle. Design should be concerned with function, usability and understandability.

Individuals and small teams have better access to information, tools and platforms than ever before, maybe they'll support a renaissance of talent.