I am always a good note taker. I love to be and I have to be in this case. This evening, the keynote speaker is the guru of Workable Technology, Donald A. Norman. Don Norman’s famous book “The Design of Everyday Things” has been the classic textbook in Human-Computer Interaction and industrial design for decades. Today his speech is “The Design of Future Things”, which is also going to be one of his new books. Okay, Here Dr. Norman comes…

Human-Centred or Task-Centred

Dr. Norman is giving the comparison about Palm Operating System and Windows Mobile operating system, claiming that Palm is Task-centred while Windows is Human-centred.

I have not used Palm before while I do understand the differences between Palm and Windows in the example he gave: Palm offers the contextual tasks for digital objects (after the picture taken, you will either Save it or Delete it) while Windows offers you options (go to file option, find a location and save it or delete it).

The differences of two interface designs only explain his concept superficially, at least I think so. What he really means that computers or any other tools we designed fundamentally are going to help users do the tasks, no additional cognitive burden, no additional frustration or confusion, Just help people do it immediately, explicitly and simply!

Study first or Design first?

Now he is talking about design methodology and process: “Separate Design and Study”. Waterfall is an old fashion in software engineering even it had or has been the main or only method we followed for ages.  Now in business-centric world, we have to dump this time-consuming method and adopt fast-track methodology: Do not wait until all problem studies finished, (which might be endless). Do designs first as soon as you know the most important business problem needed to be solved.

Sounds scary but we have to, right? Business requirement changes, technology upgrades, organization grows…how could we handle? Design it first, let it go and let it grow!

Understand User, Help user and Care user

Then he is complaining the bloody, stupid error message! We always laughed at this point. As a programmer, we tend to be too lazy to write a decent and friendly message. Or probably, we do not know the real problem, we have to let user figure it out. (So naughty! Or just beyond our control). Anyway, so many error messages or the way to handle exceptions have to be improved.

Or I see the new commitment here, for a designer or a developer, what we are supposed to do is not only to understand user about their needs, help users about their tasks and also Care user about their life! The self-explain system, the natural interaction object, the intelligent machine…all we are going to design and create are to make our life easier and happier!