Don Norman’s video on emotional design focus on the design of a product and the emotion gained by the user, good design doesn’t only focus on the overall look of an object, but how useable the object can be, there is no point for a design to look good, but hard to use or the user cannot figure out how to use it.
The first example Don Norman brought up was a lemon juicer designed by Philippe Starck. Which is designed to be a lemon juicer that is not to be used to make juice, because of the acid in a lemon and orange will ruin the plating of the product. But if the lemon juicer cannot be used to for its purpose, the product became useless. The user had to personalise the product and make it something else such as a decoration, and the ability of personalise something is what makes something yours.
As the world moves toward automation, computers become smarter and more human like. And it makes decisions for the user which is sometimes not what the user wanted, and limited the choice of the user, making a restriction. Which in terms is making it harder for the user, so automation does not necessary means better, if automation is overused, the user have less control of what can be done, examples Don Norman used includes cars, if the road condition appears to require extra attention, the car adjust the position of the driver, which may not be what the user want. Don Norman also suggested the Lexus camera system, if the driver appears to be not paying attention to the road, the car breaks itself, which might be able to save life, but it can also be more dangerous for the driver.
Also, sometimes the design itself can be useless, Norman used the idrive example, the car have the ability to do a lot of things include “a driver can adjust air conditioning and locate the nearest Dairy Queen on the same screen”, which is not a very useful design.
And the BMW has a lot of buttons and it makes the design of the car messy, and as Mercedes-Benz designed a completely opposite style to BMW, it also created problems, the design of Mercedes-Benz does look very clean, but the buttons are too close together and its making it harder for user to use.
It is the user and customers that wants more features from designs, the designers will have to throw in more buttons or computer screen, but as there are more of these things the level of complexity also increases, so that is the challenge designers have to face in future, to minimise the complexity but increase the features of products.
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