Design

Design is how to create things with many seemingly contradictory requirements.

What's the best design to design? Design for humans. Design for the people that are going to use your thing. Not just the end consumer but the people along the process in developing the thing. Start with the most natural design for humans in general. To do that you need to understand the way that humans think about things and their process for making decisions.

These thoughts are best describe by the book 'the design of everyday things" by Don norman. I highly recommend reading it, but here is my understanding of it (also see here):

Design should make sure that the user can figure out what to do and what is going on by:

• Make it easy to determine what actions are possible at any moment, making use of constraints.
• Make things visible, including the conceptual model of the system, the alternative actions, and the results of actions.
• Make it easy to evaluate the state of the system.
• Follow natural mappings between intentions and the required actions; between actions and the resulting effect; and between the information that is visible and the interpretation of the system state.

Designers should:

• Use both knowledge in the head and knowledge in the world.
• Simplify the structure of tasks.
• Make things visible: bridge the gulfs of Execution and Evaluation.
• Get the mappings right.
• Exploit the power of constraints, both natural and artificial.
• Design for error.
• When all else fails, standardize.

Designers should intentionally discourage certain actions by making the tasks more complex or difficult.

Fundamental principals of design:#

Affordances: Out of everything possible, what are the possible uses of what your designing?#

Conceptual models: What is the mental model that the user has when using what you're designing?#

Mapping: How do you communicate with the user the mapping between their mental model and the thing that you are designing?#

Feedback: How do you communicate that an action has happened and the state of the action?#

When designing something you don't want the users of it to be frustrated, confused, or misguided in their use of the thing. So what are the actions that they take so that we can minimize the errors that can happen.

1. Forming the goal: determine the function of the device.
2. Forming the intention: tell what actions are possible?
3. Specifying the an action: determine mapping from intention to action?
4. Executing an action.
5. Perceiving the state of the world: tell what state the system is in?
6. Interpreting the state of the world: determine mapping from system state to interpretation.
7. Evaluate the outcome. Tell if the system is in the desired state.

• Visibility: Show a state that is as close to both the humans conceptual model and the actual state/model of the thing.
• Conceptual Models: the way a thing should function should be as close to