My latest Yaletown View column is out…it’s on interfaces:
Have you ever pushed on a door when you should have pulled? Switched on the wrong burner on the stove? Pressed the wrong button at a bank machine? If so (and I know you have), you’ve been the victim of lousy interface design.
Every thing in the world that you interact with’your car, your fridge, your lunar lander’has an interface, a point of interaction. Each of those things has been designed by a panel of experts with you in mind. Unfortunately, it often feels like those experts are from the Ninth Circle of Hell, and they’ve got a deep hate on for you.
My personal pet peeve is DVDs. Why is it that every time I put a movie in the DVD player I have to figure out how to play it all over again. The menu system is always different. Every movie’in an effort to be flashy and hip’seems to have a ridiculously complex method of ‘pushing play’. Sometimes the DVD menu is organized in a circle, sometimes a square, sometimes a tetrahedron.
But why? Why do we struggle with everyday things every day? Why can’t we dial the phone or watch TV or cook dinner with the assurance and sauveness of, say, Martha Stewart? Surely these experts know how things should be designed, don’t they?
Cost. The experts know how to design the perfect remote control, but they generally can’t afford to build it so that everyone can buy it. For example, on the cheapy remote, the buttons are tiny, poorly organized and the labels wear off. Mine, inexplicably, has two rows of four buttons, with the nine and the zero on the final row. What’s wrong with the traditional three rows plus the zero? Who knows, but I imagine that it has to do with cost.
That’s why a company like Apple rarely makes cheap things. Take the iPod. You can now buy a similar MP3 player for considerably less money, but you can’t get the graceful lines, pleasing shape and intuitive interface. Apple snobs rejoice in espousing’and rightfully so’the gorgeous aesthetics of their computers and peripherals. Sure, part of the design is to attract the horned-rimmed designer set. But mostly it makes Apple products easier to use. And in today’s world of unintelligble user manuals and shoddy customer service, sometimes that’s worth paying for.
Some of the ideas in this column come from Donald Norman’s excellent book, The Design of Everyday Things, a must read for a designer of anything.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
You’re dangerously close to talking about affordances, a pet subject of mine. (You’re lucky I don’t have time to go on at length about it.) I did my masters thesis on affordances and metaphor. The abstract is here: http://www.calebwalker.com/from_cmu/thesis/tabstract.html (The whole thing is online too, if you’re interested.) I wrote an article too: http://www.calebwalker.com/vid/vid9704.html
This was my big pet peeve when I went to Douglas College. The door handles are randomly ‘push’ (flat bars) and ‘pull’ (tall rectangles that stick out) handles. There’s no system that I can find when a push handle will be a push handle, or a pull handle a pull handle. I was constantly pushing when I should be pulling and vice versa. Drove me crazy. I was taking a technical writing course at the time, and I think that’s what got me thinking about it. There were labels on the doors saying when to push and when to pull, but the design of functional things should be so intuitive you don’t really notice it. It annoyed me that they didn’t stick to the same convention throughout campus.