Don't puzzle me blog

Marco, a friend, send me a couple of photos of a door. He was amused by what he saw.

On this door there is no handle. Broken. The remaining hole is a possible "open the door" signifier: "stick your finger here and pull". Yes, right...but there are better signifiers: do you see the silver things glue to the door to append papers with news?

They are easy to grab to open the door. They are accidental signifiers. The problem with these signifiers is that they aren't very well glued to the door. When you pull them too hard they detach from the door. You can find the "dead" pieces on the top of the heater:

In this painting Magritte makes us think. He puzzles us. He pairs words and images. We would like to see each pair to have the same meaning. When the image of a horse doesn't corrispond to the copy "The horse" we are confused.

Magritte did this on purpose. He wanted us to think about the meaning of things and the associations we make. A picture of a thing is not the thing itself. A picture is a symbol, as well as the copy.

In his book "Living with Complexity" Norman illustrate what he calls "social signifiers" with this picture:

No people around at the train station = you probably missed the train. 

Shadows give us cues about time. 

This beautiful illustration is taken from a short little book by Bruno Munari "Drawing the sun". When the sun is low on the horizon the shadows are long. It's early or late. When the shadows are small we are close to midday.

"When we interact with a product, we need to figure out how to work it. This means discovering what it does, how it works, and what operations are possibile: discoverability." [Donald Norman]

iOS8 just came out. You can discover easily the swipe function here (very well done):

not here:

swiping left you get the hour when you've sent a message:

When I keep my phone vertical (portrait) I know where the [up] and [down] buttons for volume control are. It's intuitive: the [up] button is up. the [down] button is down. Natural mapping. The control are were I expect them to be, the mapping match my conceptual model.

When I turn the phone anti clockwise to watch a movie the [up] is left while the [down] is right. This is no more intuitive. I expect the [up] to be on the right. Even worse is the feedback on the screen that clearly makes me think that it's the [down] control to raise the volume.

If I turn the phone clockwise there is no problem. But since I'm right handed It's unnatural to turn the phone this way.

Each time I drive on the subway I think: "Why didn't they make signs bigger?". Most of the time they are difficult to read, and there is way to much text

Milano, Italy: lot of traffic. Road signs: I don’t understand them.

This one means: “Generally you can’t go, except if you are a taxi or a 2 wheel vehicle”. But why 3 icons?

I know why: bicycle, motorcycle, motorbike. As if in the middle of the traffic you can make the association and process all these information going forward at 80km/h (limit is 50km/h, I know…). Also, the bottom of the sign means: “We are checking you with cameras”. But the icon, which gets your attention first, is not a camera icon:

I would undertand this one better:

I was on the metro. Sitting in front of the metro map.

I wanted to count how many stops to my destination. I couldn't, characters were too small.

If you think that form should come after content, than you shouldn't use lorem ipsum in your mockups, but real copy.

The bad side effect of lorem ipsum is that form becomes king.

...then this is design at its best:

Nice and useful microinteraction: lights off when watching a video.

REFERENCES:

- Microinteractions by Dan Saffer

On the first line you have what we can call the car "feedback".

She "talks" to you in that spot. The message changes, sometimes it's "door open", other times "lights on", default being "Auton. 423", which tells you the fuel tank residual autonomy in KM.

The second line in the interface is the temperature of the water.

First line and second line appear to be related because of the Gestalt Proximity Principle.

This is confusing, because the first line is logically (or conceptually) related to these lines:

They tell you how many KM you run, and how much fuel you still have in the tank.

REFERENCES

1) Design principles: visual perception and the principles of Gestalt, by Steven Bradley (Smashing Magazine)

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