The Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 1
Chapter 1 was a very good introduction to the book and what the author was going to talk about. He made the first few pages very interesting to keep the reader going. When reading through the chapter the examples of he made for good and bad designs made sense once I thought about it and read more. The terms in the chapter were very informative and made it easy to follow along

Chapter 2
The falsely blaming yourself section of the chapter was very eye opening, I realized that people do that all the time and even I do it. Learned helplessness and taught helplessness were terms I had never heard of but upon reading the definition and explanation made complete sense.  It was also interesting to see how the author explained how people do things, the seven stages of action that he explained was pretty accurate.

Chapter 3
The penny thing towards the beginning of the chapter was pretty cool, I actually couldn't remember what the penny looked like I had to get one to see which one was right. Overall this chapter was a good read, it was interesting reading about how people retrieve things from memory and when that is needed and not needed. The three aspects to mental models, design, user;s, and the system image was interesting to read.

Chapter 4
Before reading this chapter I had no idea that constraints were put in place to help people know what to do, let alone that there were several different kinds of constraints. After reading the chapter I started seeing the different types of constraints in everyday things. Like keyholes, they all have physical constraints, normally if the key does not fit it to the key hole then it's obviously not for that door.

Chapter 5
There is a difference between slips and mistakes, mistakes are making a wrong goal and slips are just messing up on the way to the correct goal. I was surprised to see the amount of different kind slips that were possible. The other main topic, human cognition, was very interesting to to read about. The deep vs shallow and the narrow vs wide concepts were explained well with the chess/tic tac toe example.

Chapter 6
Saying that there was a struggle for designers to make their product more aesthetically pleasing or make it more usable made perfect sense to me. It must be hard for someone making a product to think about the user and what they think looks good vs what they would think is easy to use.

Chapter 7
This chapter was a good overview of the main points in the book and a little further explanation of a few of them. This was a very good idea by the author since there was so many different things in the book that were helpful and an entire chapter on the summation of all those things was good and made it easier to remember some of the more important points he was trying to make.

Good Designs

I use glasses everyday whether it they are sunglasses or eyeglasses. They are pretty simple you put them on and they stay on with the thingys in the back. Designed well since its really really difficult to mess up when using your glasses.

Mouses are used throughout the world by millions of people, clearly its made well since so many people have adopted the use of it. Simple 2 button 1 wheel design makes operating a mouse pretty simple. Left click to click on something, right click to bring up a menu, a flick of the wheel will make scrolling easier.

There is one of these at work it makes brewing coffee extremely easy. Since the one at work is hooked up to a water supply all you have to do is pick whatever coffee you want and press the size of cup you have and hit brew, then you are a few seconds away from a freshly brewed single cup of coffee. The things that the coffee are in make it easy to brew the coffee, they are all one size and you just throw them away after the brewing is done. This is a great design as it walks the user through the process of brewing a cup of coffee and makes it hard to mess it up.

Every guy has a wallet, it makes organizing money, gift cards, credit cards, and other things very easy. It has separate places for money and cards so its designed well. There isn't really a wrong way to use a wallet so in my opinion its pretty well designed

Rubber bands can be used in many different ways, its impossible to use them in a wrong way, and they come  in many different sizes. If that's not a good design for something I don't know what is.

Bad Designs

When Nintendo came out with the N64 they shipped with it the N64 controller of course. When I first got this system I was expecting a newer variation of the SNES controller, which had 2 shoulder buttons, a d-pad, and 4 buttons that were used for various things, what I got was 2 shoulder buttons, a joystick, a d-pad, 6 buttons, and a hidden button under the controller. This was poor designed in my opinion even though I eventually got used to it, it was very bulky and figuring out how to hold it depended on what game you were playing which makes no sense to me, I feel you should hold it the same way for each game.

Universal remotes are designed to make life easier and they kind of accomplish that since they do help when you don't have a remote for the TV at hand, but what isn't great about them is the fact that the buttons don't always line up with what you want to do with you TV. The remote is made to be used with every type of TV but different TVs have different functions so the remote can't of course have all the buttons needed to operate your TV to its max potential. So even though it is a little helpful the universal remote isn't particularly designed well. 

Medians are not what I mean by the picture, what I mean is roads with medians. Think of Texas AVE for a minute and think about how when you first got here and didn't know any better you were constantly passing your destination and having to turn around because there was a median in between you and where you wanted to be. I think that Texas could have been structured a lot better in the sense of thinking of where the driver would want to go and what would  be in their way like a median for instance, it's just annoying to have to turn around because I passed where I wanted to go and I know it happens to everyone because every time it's move in weekend you always see freshman turning around on Texas.

 This is what the doors in my house look like, there is a lock on the inside of course but there is also a hole on the other side that someone can stick a finger in to unlock. So if you want some privacy and you lock the door someone can easily unlock the door. Granted it does help if you accidentally lock the door but if you want to keep it locked someone can easily prevent that.

This is a cup holder in one of my friends cars, as you can see you have to move the little black thing to put your drink in the holder. It was very annoying and problematic to keep having to pull that thing every time I took a drink to put it back.

Overall Summary