Web Design and Psychology - The Design of Everyday Things

What is one of the most informative and inspirational books I've ever read and one that helped me when thinking about website design, usability and architecture? It's not what you would think. No, it wasn't an XML for Dummies or a Wordpress 101 book.

It was The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman.

This is the book that I recommend to anyone involved in design, especially interactive design and programming. The reason for this is because the online space is, or should be, all about the user experience.

As we discussed in Session 2 on 10.28, before you go down the path of developing your site you need to think carefully about what the site will be about, how will consumers interact with it, and what is the story it will tell. It's easy to forget that the consumer is alone without guidance and trying to figure out how to accomplish what they need to do at your site. It's important to make it easy for them to do so, especially when there could be multiple reasons to be there.

What I love about this book is that it opened my eyes to the psychology of design - which is what the user experience is all about. Here is an example: Think about walking up to a door. If the handle is horizontal, what do you do? Push, right? And if the handle is vertical? You know (or have been trained) to pull it towards you.

But have you ever walked up to a door and the door doesn't act the way you expected? People generally blame themselves for the mistake but in reality it's the door's designer or installer who is wrong, not you. They didn't think about the way we've been trained to interact with the door.

There are cues for websites too. An icon in the upper left (typically a logo) is usually clickable to go back to the home page. When it isn't you get frustrated. And you typically don't equate that with wanting to come back.

This book will resensitize you to the parameters you live with in. To quote: It could forever change how you experience and interact with your physical surroundings, open your eyes to the perversity of bad design and the desirability of good design, and raise your expectations about how things should be designed

Listening and Learning from your Customers - Twittovation

As reported by Reveries - Cool News of the Day:

There was a time when Twitter's founders objected to users referring to their posts as "Tweets," reports @claireCM in the New York Times (10/26/09). Those days ended just a few months ago, when Twitter "applied for a trademark on the term." That's just one of the many ways in which Twitter has followed its followers. "Twitter's smart enough, or lucky enough, to say, 'Gee, let's not try to compete with our users ... let's outsource design to them," says Eric von Hippel, author of Democratizing Innovation.

Twitter ceo Evan Williams agrees: "Most companies or services on the web start with wrong assumptions about what they are and what they're for," he says. "Twitter struck an interesting balance of flexibility and malleability that allowed users to invent uses for it that weren't anticipated." Among other things, Twitter users invented the idea of putting the @ symbol before their user names (e.g., @cool_news). They also picked up the idea of using the # symbol to categorize topics -- another innovation Twitter initially resisted.

The # idea came from open-source advocate @chrismessina, who says Twitter thought the # concept was too nerdy for mass appeal. Well, now Twitter "hyperlinks the hash tags so readers can click and see all the other posts on a topic." Twitter is now also about to formalize the RT, or "retweet," feature, which users have long used to "send a post by another Twitter user to their own set of followers." Evan Williams says Twitter's plan is to keep following its followers. "You get a bunch of users interacting and it's hard to predict what they're going to do," he says. "We say, 'Why are people using this and how could we make that better?'"