Norman keeps coming back to how complex a car’s interior controls are and yet for the most part, they are fairly easy to use. Without much thought, you can steer the car, make it move, park it, turn the radio on, find a station, adjust the seats, etc. A basic model car does hundreds of tasks, yet you are able to use it fairly easily.
What about the everyday door? Have you ever thought about how hard a door is to operate? Do you push or pull? If you push, what side do you push on? Does the door rotate? Revolve? Slide? Or maybe it’s automatic. Is there some type of knob or handle? Does you turn it? Do you pull down on it? Although these seem like basic concepts, you know for a fact you’ve seen someone run into a door, thinking it needs to be pushed to be opened when really it needs to be pulled. Why is there not a standard for something that everyone uses everyday and that is concept is so incredibly basic.
My question to you is, what do you consider good design or bad design in relation to something you use everyday? Since I’m a web developer, naturally I have a huge problem with a recent web site I visited. The download page for Internet Explorer (surprise, surprise that a Microsoft webpage would have terrible usability).
Nothing is intuitive. They’re pushing a beta build of the browser on people which is ironic considering if you’re still using Internet Explorer, you more than likely have no idea that the blue ‘e’ on your desktop isn’t actually ‘the internet’. The download link for IE7 is under a banner for IE8 that looks like a header image, not a banner. Finally, one of the download links is hidden in a bullet point inside the content area. This whole page is a complete nightmare.
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