I’ve read
chapter 6, 7 and 8 in the book ‘Designing for Interaction’ by Dan Saffer. It was
an interested read, the first part being about brainstorming and coming up with
ideas for the project and the design. Following come descriptions of ways to
work with the development of the design. Many factors weigh in, like for
example time, money, user needs, business needs, context and teams and so on,
which affects the design. There were a few laws mentioned which I found particularly
interesting:
Fitt’s law from 1954 which says the time it takes to move
from a starting position to a final target is determined by two things: the
distance to the target and the size of the target. This law is useful when
designing for interactive screens.
Hick’s law says that the time it takes for users to make
decisions is determined by the number of possible choices they have. As an
example, users make a quicker choice from one menu of 10 items than from two
menus of 5 items each. This is not working for sites full of content though, as
Yahoo and Amazon.
Tesler’s Law of the Conservation of Complexity says that you can only simplify the
process so far, and then move the inherent complexity. E-mail is mentioned as
an example, where you only need address of the receiver and of the sender, but
the software can automatically take care of your e-mail and save who you write
to frequently.
I think it’s
interesting to read about laws since we so far haven’t really come across any
in this project, and in all technological courses we read we always have rules
to follow. I’m curious to see what other’s put out as guidelines in this
subject.
I also
found the section where interaction designer standards where discussed
interesting. Some standards are widely used (short commands were mentioned in
the text). We discussed standards at the lecture the 15 of October, more
specific how many webpages created today look a lot like Facebook. I’d like to
end this blog post with the question: is it because Facebook has many users or
because it has the best design?
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