Mapping is the relationship between control and effect. Users need to be able to tell how to access information they want from a website, or else they’ll just leave. For web designers, affordance is even more important. For example, a mug has high affordance: it's easy to figure out intuitively how to use it. It’s simple and effective feedback.Īffordance is the relationship between what something looks like and how it's used.įor designers, it means that as soon as someone sees something, they have to know how to use it. The little spinning circle starts as soon as you hit enter, so you know something's happening, and goes faster when the page is about to load, so you know you're about to do something again. Google Chrome does a great job of this when they're loading pages. There needs to be some indication, like a sound, a moving dial, a spinning rainbow wheel, that the user’s action caused something. This is even more important for mobile design, when screen space is at a premium and there's a strong (STRONG) desire to get rid of everything except your CTA.Įvery action needs a reaction. In the case of websites, this is an easy win.įor example, use intuitive iconography that clearly indicates there are more options hiding deeper down (for example, the Hamburger). Users need to know what all the options are, and know straight away how to access them. This confusion (which often results in panicky button pushing) is called the gulf of evaluation – you have nothing to evaluate! You expect a message to pop up saying 'well done! Now please continue to shop' if nothing happens, you don't know what to do because the feedback you expected didn't happen, and in fact no feedback happened at all. You've entered your credit card details and clicked check out. The gulf of evaluation is when a user is expecting feedback from a system, and the system either doesn’t provide the feedback at all or, alternatively, doesn't give the feedback the user is expecting. It's much larger when there are lots of roadblocks, like having lots of fields in a contact form. This gulf is small where there are only a few roadblocks (like when you're deleting a photo). What happens in between is the gulf of execution, e.g. Your goal is to delete it, and the end result is it being deleted. Say you want to delete a photo from Facebook. His idea is that there are two gulfs to avoid: the gulf of execution and the gulf of evaluation. Norman's main idea is that devices, things, computers, and interfaces should be functional, easy to use, and intuitive. But when it comes to web and interaction design, Donald Norman provides maybe the best six to abide by.ĭonald Norman is one of the greats of computer human interaction and user-centred design (he did, after all, coin the term) and his principles are a good place to start with any design project.
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