This week I have learned about The Double Diamond Model of Design and The Human-Centered Design Process described by Don Norman in his The Design of Everyday Things book. This is where the double-diamond divided the design process into four stages. The first diamond stands for finding the right problem followed by discovering and defining phases. Whereas the second diamond represents finding the right solution with the development and delivery phases. This is where the human-centered design process is implemented with its four different activities of observation, Idea generation (ideation), prototyping, and testing. These activities are iterated while with each cycle improving the usability of the design and leads closer to the right solution.
Second, I expanded my learnings from reading the Designing with the Mind in Mind by Jeff Johnson. Where he is explaining that learning from experience and performing learned actions are easy for humans and that many factors affect our learnings. The events in the world take time and people are driven by the time requirements and rarely make rational decisions. However, our hands and eyes are following different laws while we interact with digital products. By knowing these principles the user experience designer’s goal is to reduce the gap between the tool that the user wants to satisfy her/his needs and the operations the tool provides.
To design the tool operations that would match the user’s needs designers perform a good task analysis by answering many questions related to the user tasks. The next step is to design a conceptual model that abstractly describes what tasks the user can perform and what s/he should be aware of to complete them. Then the consistency and keystroke-level consistency becomes relevant which determines how quickly the interaction with the system becomes automatic. When the risk is low while interacting with the system we explore and learn more, in fact, we learn faster when an operation is task-focused, simple, familiar, and consistent. It minimizes the time and experience to complete the task using the application hence becomes automatic.
References:
Norman, D.A. (2013). The design of everyday things: Revised and expanded edition. New York: Basic Books.
Johnson, J. (2014). Designing with the mind in mind, second edition: Simple guide to understanding user interface design guidelines. Waltham, MA: Morgan Kaufmann.