FOUNDING FATHERS LINKED TO USER-CENTERED DESIGN
by Gordon Akwera, Information Design Director
When Thomas Jefferson wrote his Notes on Coinage in 1784, he specifically commented on the virtues of a decimal-denominated monetary system. As we all know, the result was the simple, intuitive base-ten currency system we still use today.
Jefferson's plea for user-centered design has been echoed in modern times by many other "founding fathers," including Henry Dreyfuss (Designing for People, 1951), Edward Tufte (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 1983), Donald Norman (The Design of Everyday Things, 1988) and Richard Saul Wurman (Information Anxiety 2, 2001). A perusal of these works, which address areas of expertise from charts and graphs to steam locomotives, yields food for thought in enhancing the customer experience through user-centered design.
In The Design of Everyday Things, for example, cognitive scientist Donald Norman discusses the design of those common objects—doors, faucets, telephones, computer systems—that often thwart users and diminish the client experience.
Among Norman's "principles for transforming difficult tasks into simple ones":
The structured template is the ultimate manifestation of user-centered design—a rigid framework that guides the content of the piece. Created to ensure ease of use, the template specifies information "containers"; the same type of information always appears in the same container.
For customers, a structured template yields functional communications that aid comprehension rather than thwart it. For companies, these designs help achieve desired action steps, reduce error rates, lower servicing costs and facilitate future repurposing (for example, from print to presentation systems or the Web). And by sparking the creation of designs that are usable, functional, and understandable, the structured template supports communications with the same simplicity and elegance as our decimal coinage system.
1Norman, Donald. The Design of Everyday Things. New York; Basic Books, 1988
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When Thomas Jefferson wrote his Notes on Coinage in 1784, he specifically commented on the virtues of a decimal-denominated monetary system. As we all know, the result was the simple, intuitive base-ten currency system we still use today.
Jefferson's plea for user-centered design has been echoed in modern times by many other "founding fathers," including Henry Dreyfuss (Designing for People, 1951), Edward Tufte (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 1983), Donald Norman (The Design of Everyday Things, 1988) and Richard Saul Wurman (Information Anxiety 2, 2001). A perusal of these works, which address areas of expertise from charts and graphs to steam locomotives, yields food for thought in enhancing the customer experience through user-centered design.
In The Design of Everyday Things, for example, cognitive scientist Donald Norman discusses the design of those common objects—doors, faucets, telephones, computer systems—that often thwart users and diminish the client experience.
Among Norman's "principles for transforming difficult tasks into simple ones":
- Simplify the structure of tasks
- Get the mappings right
- Exploit the power of constraints
- Design for error
- When all else fails, standardize1
The structured template is the ultimate manifestation of user-centered design—a rigid framework that guides the content of the piece. Created to ensure ease of use, the template specifies information "containers"; the same type of information always appears in the same container.
For customers, a structured template yields functional communications that aid comprehension rather than thwart it. For companies, these designs help achieve desired action steps, reduce error rates, lower servicing costs and facilitate future repurposing (for example, from print to presentation systems or the Web). And by sparking the creation of designs that are usable, functional, and understandable, the structured template supports communications with the same simplicity and elegance as our decimal coinage system.
1Norman, Donald. The Design of Everyday Things. New York; Basic Books, 1988
Contact us for more information
