Recently I have been learning a UX design specification on Coursera by DC San Diego to both review my old knowledges of UX design and learn more about HCI design.
I am studying the Design Principles and working on the assignment. It requires us to spot failures of design in life to practice the fundamental design principles. The main three principles we explore are
Direct Manipulation;
World in Miniature;
Distributed Cognition
For each, a physical and/or digital interface that violates it needs to be found in accordance with an explanation and a redesign sketch.
Direct Manipulation
Digital Interface: Vllo video editing app
The monitor part of the interface is extremely small to view the edited screen.
photo by YilinGao
Physical Interface: Setting a timer alarm on oven
The interface is not clear enough to set a timer without reading the manual. The buttons and screen on an oven are supposed to help set alarms and switch among different modes easily. But without reading the manual, how alarms should be set is not clear enough, and the numbers and symbols shown on the interface screen don't tell the state of the system very well so that users are not sure if the buttons are performing the action correctly.
photo by YilinGao
The redesign enlarged the screen to show status and turned the buttons into rotary table to adjust time easily.
In this redesign, I turned the buttons on the original oven into rotary table in order to adjust time and set alarms easily. The unit of time left and temperature are marked beside the rotary tables to avoid confusion. The visual of the timer shows how much time has passed and how long is left to give a better idea of the completion of the dish. Below the manipulating tables, another small monitor shows the current time.
photo by YilinGao
World in Miniature: Product tour on Mango app
The size detail of each product only has length that shows in inches, no other dimensions nor centimetres nor references.
Different people have different body shapes, so dimensions matter greatly when shopping online. However, instead of providing full sizes details and modelling info, Mango only shows the length of the jeans, which could be drastically affecting customers' final decision of purchasing. When the product is minimized from real life into digital world, a reference of equal proportions should also be subsequently presented.
photos by YilinGao
The redesign emphasizes the dimensions of the item and modelling information in the product detail part.
photo by YilinGao
Distributed cognition
Physical Interface:TV remote
Too many unnecessary buttons on the remote are distracting attention and preventing users to perform the task.
photo by YilinGao
Digital Interface: LinkedIn homepage
This original LinkedIn homepage is so crowded with different kinds and amount of information. While for the primary user group - job seekers, the job posts and contacts feed should be the most important two things. With a lot of other info, users are distracted from what is really .
photo by YilinGao
Redesign of LinkedIn homepage, Emphasise the main feature, hiding the rest. The original homepage has too much content demonstrating on the same page whereas the redesigned one defined the hierarchies by only listing and labelling titles of feature, such as webinar, courses and news, hiding its content in the next page. Also, what matters most for LinkedIn users are jobs, feed and posting, so they are made bigger. The layout is now showing what users care the most so the cognition could be distributed fairly.
photo by YilinGao
Overall, it is fun but a little bit more difficult than I thought to find and redesign the physical and digital examples that violate design principles around me. Although I do get stumbled and annoyed by a lot of bad designs in life but I guess I just don't pay enough attention in memorising them. However, to be fair, there are also a lot lot of good designs around me which adding the difficulties for me to find the bad ones.
These three design principles are indeed helpful and classic that applies to almost all the designs in life. I hope my works could provide some inspiration for you, thanks for watching!
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