Sublime

“Don’t make me think!” For as long I can remember, I’ve been telling people that this is my first law of usability. It’s the overriding principle—the ultimate tie breaker when deciding whether a design works or it doesn’t.

common wisdom or intuition, the worst design problem is a clean canvas.

Ginny Redish’s book Letting Go of the Words.

Don Norman explains so enjoyably in his recently updated usability classic The Design of Everyday Things, we’re constantly parsing our environment (like the handles on doors) for these clues (to decide whether to pull or push).

Norman contrasts an autopilot that hums along until it panics—and only then does the pilot learn there was a problem at all—with an autopilot that reports its troubles in stages.

We need design—not just as a service to make our product beautiful—but to discover the right product.