3Dmusic UI design

Tools & Trade: 3Dmusic UI Design

Research Notes: Tilt Sensor

Accelerometer: Returns the measure of g-forces on the device with respect to the X, Y and Z axes(movement in space) Compass: Returns a heading with respect to North(look for the North) Gyrometer: Returns the measure of angular velocity with respect to the X, Y, and Z axes(Rotation) Inclinometer: Returns the pitch, roll, and yaw values that correspond to the rotation angles around the X, Y, and Z (Rotation angle, XYZ)

Betekenis

Een inclinometer (ook wel clinometer of hellingmeter genoemd) is een instrument waarmee met behulp van de zwaartekracht hoeken van hellingen gemeten kunnen worden. Inclinometers worden onder andere voor het meten van hellingen in de bouw, luchtvaart, scheepvaart en wegenbouw gebruikt. Indirekt kan er ook de hoogte van bijvoorbeeld een boom, mast, of een ander bouwwerk mee berekend worden.

Bij namen It is also known as a tilt meter, tilt indicator, slope alert, slope gauge, gradient meter, gradiometer, level gauge, level meter, declinometer, and pitch & roll indicator.

tilt meter, tilt indicator, slope alert, slope gauge, gradient meter, gradiometer, level gauge, level meter, declinometer, and pitch & roll indicator.

Geschiedenis

Inclinometers omvatten voorbeelden zoals Well in-clinometer, de essentiële delen waarvan een vlakke kant, of basis, waarop hij staat, en een holle schijf slechts de helft gevuld met een aantal zware vloeistof.

Het glazen oppervlak van de schijf wordt omgeven door een schaalverdeling die de hoek waarbij de oppervlakte van de vloeistof bevindt, onder verwijzing naar de vlakke basis markeert. De nullijn evenwijdig aan de basis, en wanneer de vloeistof staat op die lijn, de platte kant horizontaal; het 90 graden loodrecht op de basis, en wanneer de vloeistof staat op die lijn, de platte kant loodrecht of loodrecht. Tussenliggende hoeken zijn gemarkeerd, en, met behulp van eenvoudige conversie tabellen, het instrument geeft het tempo van de daling per ingestelde afstand van de horizontale meting, en stel de afstand van de schuine lijn.

Topographic Abney level

De Abney niveau is een handheld meetinstrument ontwikkeld in de jaren 1870, dat een waarneming buis en inclinometer, zo opgesteld dat de landmeter de waarneming buis (en de crosshair) kan af te stemmen met de reflectie van de luchtbel in de waterpas van de inclinometer wanneer het omvat lijn van het zicht is op de op de inclinometer hoek.

Analoog Tilt - Tuturial

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Een van de meer bekende hellingsmeter installaties was op het achterpaneel van de Ryan NYP "The Spirit of St. Louis" - in 1927 Charles Lindbergh koos de lichtgewicht Rieker Inc P-1057 Degree Inclinometer om hem te klimmen en afdaling hoek informatie.

Sensortechnologie

Tilt sensoren en inclinometers genereren van een kunstmatige horizon en meet hoekige tilt met betrekking tot deze horizon. Ze worden gebruikt in camera's, vliegtuigen vlucht controles, auto beveiligingssystemen, en speciale schakelaars en worden ook gebruikt voor het platform egaliseren, giek hoek indicatie en in andere toepassingen waarbij het meten van tilt.

camera's, vliegtuigen vlucht controles, auto beveiligingssystemen, boten, PlayStation 3 en Wii game controllers & Segway Transporters

Belangrijke specificaties te overwegen bij het zoeken naar tilt sensoren en inclinometers zijn de hellingshoek assortiment en het aantal assen (die meestal, maar niet altijd, orthogonale). De hellingshoek bereik is het bereik van de gewenste lineaire uitgang. Voorkomende implementaties van tilt sensoren en hellingmeters zijn accelerometer, Liquid Capacitieve, elektrolytische, gasbel in vloeibare en slinger. Tilt sensor technologie is ook geïmplementeerd in video games. Yoshi's Universal Gravitation en Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble zijn beide opgebouwd rond een tilt sensor mechanisme, dat is ingebouwd in de cartridge. De PlayStation 3 en Wii game controllers gebruiken ook kantelen als een middel om videospellen te spelen. Inclinometers worden ook gebruikt in de civiele techniek, bijvoorbeeld de helling van de grond te bouwen op maat.

How Electrolytic Tilt Sensors Work Figure 1 shows one axis of a fluid-filled sensor tipped at ~15°. As the sensor tilts, the surface of the fluid remains level due to gravity. The fluid is electrically conductive, and the conductivity between the two electrodes is proportional to the length of electrode immersed in the fluid. At the angle shown, for example, the conductivity between pins a and b would be greater than that between b and c. Electrically, the sensor is similar to a potentiometer, with resistance changing in proportion to tilt angle.

Hoe elektrolytische Tilt Sensors Work Figuur 1 toont een as van een met vloeistof gevulde sensor getipt bij ~ 15 °. Aangezien de sensor kantelt, het oppervlak van de vloeistof blijft horizontaal gevolg van de zwaartekracht. De vloeistof is elektrisch geleidend, en het geleidingsvermogen tussen de twee elektroden is evenredig met de lengte van de elektrode ondergedompeld in de vloeistof. Op de figuur wordt weergegeven, bijvoorbeeld de geleidbaarheid tussen pinnen a en b groter zou zijn dan die tussen b en c zijn. Elektrisch, de sensor is vergelijkbaar met een potentiometer, weerstand verandert evenredig met hoek kantelen.

4-Directional Tilt Sensor Item code: 28036

What It Can Do

- Measures rotatation position in four directions - Basic tilt sensing when accelerometer is not required - Easy interface with two digital on/off outputs

The 4-Directional Tilt Sensor indicates rotational position. Two digital (on/off) outputs indicate which side of the sensor is pointing down: the top, bottom, left, or right. The tilt sensor is an economical alternative to more expensive accelerometers, when precise angular feedback isn’t necessary. The sensor provides two independent outputs, labeled Out 1 and Out 2, which together indicate which side of the device (top, bottom, left, right) is facing the ground. Inside the 4-Directional Tilt Sensor is a small captive ball that alternately blocks or allows light to strike a pair of photodetectors. Because this ball is sensitive to both gravity and very fast motion, the tilt sensor is best when attached to stationary or slower-moving objects.

Source: [[2]]

waterpas 2.1.2 APK for Android

Research Notes: Accelerometer

Moving the housing the Seismic Mass stretches calculates the force of gravity (G-force)

3 accelerometer on the Axis, can calculate the rotation of the device

Smartphone accelerometer

Seismic Mass that can move

If if the center cation (Seismic Mass) moves, current will flow. Engineers correlate the amount of flowing current to acceleration

1/50th of an inch MEMS Micro Electro - Mechanical Systems

formula Newton's second law of motion relates force, mass, and acceleration through this very simple equation:

Force = mass x acceleration or... F = m a or... a = F / m

Use - Wii controllers - Smartphone - Jump Rope - Running - Camera: built-in accelerometer to trigger the shutter when it detects the camera being stable. - Text reader app: incorporating some form of scrolling.

Iphone apps using accelerometer Source: http://www.creativeapplications.net/i-os/10-creative-ways-to-use-the-accelerometer-iphone/

- Creating Depth

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- Rocketships: Accelerometers are the stuff of rocket science—quite literally! Mounted in spacecraft, they're a handy way to measure not just changes in rocket speed but also apogee (when a craft is at its maximum distance from Earth - airplane and ship autopilots. - Car Airbags - heating appliances, such as electronic irons and fan heaters, have accelerometers inside that detect when they fall over and switch them off to stop them causing fires? - SEISMOLOGISCH ONDERZOEK VAN DE NEDERLANDSE BODEM

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Research Notes: Donald Norman

- Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself.

- Why? Because we are all designers in the sense that all of us deliberately design our lives, our rooms, and the way we do things

- To understand products, it is not enough to understand design or technology: it is critical to understand business.

- The one thing I can predict with certainty is that the principles of human psychology will remain the same, which means that the design principles here, based on psychology, on the nature of human cognition, emotion, action, and interaction with the world, will remain unchanged.

- book Living with Complexity. The first edition had a focus upon affordances, but although affordances

- make sense for interaction with physical objects, they are confusing when dealing with virtual ones

- book The Design of Future Things) and what I consider the best new approach to deal with design so as to either eliminate or minimize human error: resilience engineering.

- “You have trouble opening doors?” Yes. I push doors that are meant to be pulled, pull doors that should be pushed, and walk into doors that neither pull nor push, but slide.

- books Catalogue d’objets introuvables (Catalog of unfindable objects) provides delightful examples of everyday things that are deliberately unwork- able, outrageous, or otherwise ill-formed.

- The design of the door should indicate how to work it without any need for signs, certainly without any need for trial and error.

- Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding. Discoverability: Is it possible to even figure out what actions are possible and where and how to per- form them?

- Whether the device is a door or a stove, a mobile phone or a nuclear power plant, the relevant components must be visible, and they must communicate the correct message: What actions are possible?

- With complex devices, discoverability and understanding require the aid of manuals or personal instruction. We accept this if the device is indeed complex, but it should be unnecessary for simple things. Many products defy understanding simply because they have too many functions and controls.

- All artificial things are designed. Whether it is the layout of furniture in a room, the paths through a garden or forest, or the intricacies of an electronic device, some person or group of people had to decide upon the layout, operation, and mechanisms.

- But even though people have designed things since prehistoric times, the field of design is relatively new, divided into many areas of specialty.

- In the best of cases, the products should also be delightful and enjoyable, which means that not only must the requirements of engineering, manufacturing, and ergonomics be sat- isfied, but attention must be paid to the entire experience, which means the aesthetics of form and the quality of interaction.

- Industrial design: The professional service of creating and developing concepts and specifications that optimize the function, value, and appearance of products and systems for the mutual benefit of both user and manufacturer (from the Industrial Design Society of America’s website).

- Interaction design: The focus is upon how people interact with technology. The goal is to enhance people’s understanding of what can be done, what is happening, and what has just occurred. Interaction design draws upon principles of psychology, design, art, and emotion to ensure a positive, enjoyable experience.

- Experience design: The practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality and enjoyment of the total experience.

- When done badly, the products are unusable, leading to great frustration and irritation. Or they might be usable, but force us to behave the way the product wishes rather than as we wish.

- By human standards, machines are pretty limited. They do not maintain the same kind of rich history of experiences that people have in common with one another, experiences that enable us to interact with others because of this shared understanding. Instead, machines usually follow rather simple, rigid rules of be- havior. If we get the rules wrong even slightly, the machine does what it is told, no matter how insensible and illogical.

- People are imaginative and creative, filled with common sense; that is, a lot of valuable knowledge built up over years of experience. But instead of capitalizing on these strengths, machines require us to be precise and accurate, things we are not very good at.

- It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.

- Some come from the limitations of today’s technology. Some come from self-imposed restrictions by the designers, often to hold down cost. But most of the problems come from a complete lack of understanding of the design principles necessary for effective human-machine interaction.

- But most of the problems come from a complete lack of understanding of the design principles necessary for effective human-machine interaction. Why this deficiency? Because much of the design is done by engineers who are experts in technology but limited in their understanding of people.

- Engineers, moreover, make the mistake of thinking that logical explanation is sufficient: “If only people would read the instructions,” they say, “everything would be all right.”

- When people have trouble, the engineers are upset, but often for the wrong reason. “What are these people doing?” they will wonder. “Why are they doing that?” The problem with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.

- The moral was simple: we were designing things for people, so we needed to understand both technology and people. But that’s a difficult step for many engineers: machines are so logical, so orderly. If we didn’t have people, everything would work so much better. Yup, that’s how I used to think.

- Why are people having problems?” they wonder. “You are being too logical,” I say. “You are designing for people the way you would like them to be, not for the way they really are.”

- But even though much has improved, the rapid rate of technology change outpaces the advances in design. New technologies, new applications, and new methods of interaction are continually arising and evolving.

- The solution is human-centered design (HCD), an approach that puts human needs, capabilities, and behavior first, then designs to accommodate those needs, capabilities, and ways of behaving. Good design starts with an understanding of psychology and technology. Good design requires good communication, especially from machine to person, indicating what actions are possible, what is happening, and what is about to happen. Communication is especially important when things go wrong.

- Human-centered design is a design philosophy. It means starting with a good understanding of people and the needs that the design is intended to meet. This understanding comes about primarily through observation, for people themselves are often unaware of their true needs, even unaware of the difficulties they are encountering. Getting the specification of the thing to be defined is one of the most difficult parts of the design, so much so that the HCD principle is to avoid specifying the problem as long as possible but instead to iterate upon repeated approximations. This is done through rapid tests of ideas, and after each test modifying the approach and the problem definition. The results can be products that truly meet the needs of people.

- Great designers produce pleasurable experiences. Experience: note the word. Engineers tend not to like it; it is too subjective. But when I ask them about their favorite automobile or test equipment, they will smile delightedly as they discuss the fit and finish, the sensa- tion of power during acceleration, their ease of control while shift- ing or steering, or the wonderful feel of the knobs and switches on the instrument.

- Was the overall experience positive, or was it frustrating and confusing? When our home technology behaves in an uninterpretable fashion we can become confused, frustrated, and even angry—all strong negative emotions.

- Discoverability results from appropriate application of five fundamental psychological concepts covered in the next few chapters: affordances, signifiers, constraints, mappings, and feedback. But there is a sixth principle, perhaps most important of all: the conceptual model of the system.

- Many of the new objects are similar to ones we already

- know, but many are unique, yet we manage quite well. How do we do this? Why is it that when we encounter many unusual natural objects, we know how to interact with them? Why is this true with many of the artificial, human-made objects we encounter? The an- swer lies with a few basic principles.

- The term affordance refers to the relationship between a physical object and a person (or for that matter

- Glass affords transparency. At the same time, its physical struc- ture blocks the passage of most physical objects. As a result, glass affords seeing through and support, but not the passage of air or most physical objects (atomic particles can pass through glass).

- The reason we like glass is its relative invis- ibility, but this aspect, so useful in the normal window, also hides its anti-affordance property of blocking passage. As a result, birds often try to fly through windows. And every year, numerous peo- ple injure themselves when they walk (or run) through closed glass

- J. J. Gibson, an eminent psychologist who provided many advances to our understanding of human perception.

- Gibsonian psychology, an ecological approach to percep- tion.

- When I pondered my question—how do people know how to act when confronted with a novel situation—I realized that a large part of the answer lay in Gibson’s work. He pointed out that all the senses work together, that we pick up information about the world by the combined result of all of them. “Information pickup” was one of his favorite phrases, and Gibson believed that the combined information picked up by all of our sensory apparatus—sight, sound, smell, touch, balance, kinesthetic, acceleration, body position— determines our perceptions without the need for internal pro- cessing or cognition.

- Balls are for throwing or bouncing. Perceived affordances help people figure out what actions are possible with- out the need for labels or instructions.

- Many people find affordances difficult to understand because they are relationships, not properties.

- They soon discovered that when working with the graphical designs for electronic displays, they needed a way to designate which parts could be touched, slid upward, downward, or sideways, or tapped upon. The actions could be done with a mouse, stylus, or fingers. Some systems responded to body motions, gestures, and spoken words, with no touching of any physical device.

- There was no word that fit, so they took the closest existing word—affordance. Soon designers were saying such things as, “I put an affordance there,” to describe why they displayed a circle on a screen to indicate where the person should touch, whether by mouse or by finger. “No,” I said, “that is not an affordance. That is a way of communicating where the touch should be.

- affordance of touching exists on the entire screen: you are trying to signify where the touch should take place. That’s not the same thing as saying what action is possible.”

- People search for clues, for any sign that might help them cope and understand.

- The term signifier has had a long and illustrious career in the exotic field of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols.

- Semiotics meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

- Some natural mappings are cultural or biological, as in the universal standard that moving the hand up signifies more, moving it down signifies less,

- Other natural mappings follow from the principles of perception and allow for the natural grouping or patterning of controls and feedback.

- Note that there are many mappings that feel “natural” but in fact are specific to a particular culture: what is natural for one culture is not necessarily natural for another.

- The principles are simple but rarely incorporated into design. Good design takes care, planning, thought, and an understanding of how people behave.

- Poor feedback can be worse than no feedback at all, because it is distracting, uninformative, and in many cases irritating and anxiety-provoking.

- Feedback

- Too much feedback can be even more annoying than too little. My dishwasher likes to beep at three a.m. to tell me that the wash is done, defeating my goal of having it work in the middle of the night so as not to disturb anyone

- Feedback is essential, but not when it gets in the way of other things, including a calm and relaxing environment.

- Poor design of feedback can be the result of decisions aimed at reducing costs, even if they make life more difficult for people. Rather than use multiple signal lights, informative displays, or rich, musical sounds with varying patterns, the focus upon cost reduction forces the design to use a single light or sound to convey multiple types of information

- Just as with the lights, the only way to signal different states of the machine is by beeping different patterns. What do all these different patterns mean? How can we possibly learn and remember them?

- Feedback has to be planned. All actions need to be confirmed, but in a manner that is unobtrusive. Feedback must also be prior- itized, so that unimportant information is presented in an unob- trusive fashion, but important signals are presented in a way that does capture attention.

- Technology offers the potential to make life easier and more enjoyable; each new technology provides increased benefits.

- The obvious solution is to use exotic gestures or spoken commands, but how will we learn, and then remember, them?

- This leads the discussion to the role of understanding (via a conceptual model) and of emotions: pleasure when things work smoothly and frustration when our plans are thwarted.

- The gulfs are present for many devices. Interestingly, many peo- ple do experience difficulties, but explain them away by blaming themselves.

- The specific actions bridge the gap between what we would like to have done (our goals) and all possible physical actions to achieve those goals. After we specify what actions to make, we must actually do them—the stages of execution. There are three stages of execution that follow from the goal: plan, specify, and perform (the left side of Figure 2.2). Evaluating what happened has three stages: first, perceiving what happened in the world; second, trying to make sense of it (interpreting it); and, finally, comparing what happened with what was wanted (the right side of Figure 2.2).

- There we have it. Seven stages of action: one for goals, three for execution, and three for evaluation (Figure 2.2).

- 1. Goal (form the goal)

- 2. Plan (the action)

- 3. Specify (an action sequence)

- 4. Perform (the action sequence)

- 5. Perceive (the state of the world)

- 6. Interpret (the perception)

- 7. Compare (the outcome with the goal)

- Not all of the activity in the stages is conscious.

- It is only when we come across something new or reach some impasse, some problem that disrupts the normal flow of activity, that conscious attention is required.

- The action cycle can start from the top, by establishing a new goal, in which case we call it goal-driven behavior. In this situ ation, the cycle starts with the goal and then goes through the three stages of execution.

- Why do we need to know about the human mind? Because things are designed to be used by people, and without a deep understanding of people, the designs are apt to be faulty, difficult to use, difficult to understand.

- The mind is more difficult to comprehend than actions. Most of us start by believing we already understand both human behavior and the human mind. After all, we are all human: we have all lived with ourselves all of our lives, and we like to think we understand ourselves. But the truth is, we don’t. Most of human behavior is a result of subconscious processes. We are unaware of them. As a result, many of our beliefs about how people behave—including beliefs about ourselves—are wrong.

- The human mind is immensely complex, having evolved over a long period with many specialized structures.

- Riding a bicycle or driving a car. Singing. All of these skills take considerable time and practice to master, but once mastered, they are often done quite automatically.

- Because we are only aware of the reflective level of conscious processing, we tend to believe that all human thought is con- scious. But it isn’t. We also tend to believe that thought can be separated from emotion. This is also false. Cognition and emo- tion cannot be separated. Cognitive thoughts lead to emotions: emotions drive cognitive thoughts.

- Emotion is highly underrated. In fact, the emotional system is a powerful information processing system that works in tandem with cognition.

- Cognition attempts to make sense of the world: emotion assigns value. It is the emotional system that determines whether a situation is safe or threatening, whether something that is happening is good or bad, desirable or not. Cognition provides understanding: emotion provides value judgments.

- Subconscious thought matches patterns, finding the best possible match of one’s past experience to the current one. It proceeds rap- idly and automatically, without effort. Subconscious processing is one of our strengths.

- Conscious thought is quite different. It is slow and labored. Here is where we slowly ponder decisions, think through alter- natives, compare different choices.

- Conscious thought is quite different. It is slow and labored. Here is where we slowly ponder decisions, think through alter- natives, compare different choices.

- Conscious thought considers first this approach, then that—comparing, rationalizing, finding explanations. Formal logic, mathematics, decision theory: these are the tools of conscious thought. Both conscious and subconscious modes of thought are powerful and essential aspects of human life.

- Both can provide insightful leaps and creative moments. And both are subject to errors, misconceptions, and failures.

- A positive emotional state is ideal for creative thought, but it is not very well suited for getting things done. Too much, and we call the person scatterbrained, flitting from one topic to another, unable to finish one thought before another comes to mind. A brain in a negative emotional state provides focus: precisely what is needed to maintain attention on a task and finish it. Too much, however, and we get tunnel vision, where people are unable to look beyond their narrow point of view. - Both the positive, relaxed state and the anxious, negative, and tense state are valuable and powerful tools for human creativity and action. The extremes of both states, how- ever, can be dangerous.

- One valuable explanation of the lev- els of processing within the brain, applicable to both cognitive and emotional processing, is to think of three different levels of processing, each quite different from the other, but all working together in concert. Although this is a gross oversimplification of the actual processing, it is a good enough approximation to provide guidance in understanding human behavior. The approach I use here comes from my book Emotional Design.

- Three Levels of Processing: Visceral, Behavioral, and Reflective. Visceral and behavioral levels are subcon- scious and the home of basic emotions. The reflective level is where conscious thought and decision-making reside, as well as the highest level of emotions.

- Great designers use their aesthetic sensibilities to drive these visceral responses.

- For designers, the most critical aspect of the behavioral level is that every action is associated with an expectation.

- Expect a positive outcome and the result is a positive affective response (a “posi- tive valence,” in the scientific literature). Expect a negative outcome and the result is a negative affective response (a negative valence): dread and hope, anxiety and anticipation.

- To the designer, reflection is perhaps the most important of the levels of processing. Reflection is conscious, and the emotions produced at this level are the most protracted: those that assign agency and cause, such as guilt and blame or praise and pride. Re- flective responses are part of our memory of events. Memories last far longer than the immediate experience or the period of usage, which are the domains of the visceral and behavioral levels.

- All three levels of processing work together. All play essential roles in determining a person’s like or dislike of a product or ser- vice. One nasty experience with a service provider can spoil all future experiences.

- Designing at all three levels is so important that I devote an entire book to the topic, Emotional Design.

- In psychology, there has been a long debate about which hap- pens first: emotion or cognition. Do we run and flee because some event happened that made us afraid? Or are we afraid because our conscious, reflective mind notices that we are running?

- a state that the social scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has labeled “flow.” Csikszentmihalyi has long studied how people interact with their work and play, and how their lives reflect this intermix of activities. When in the flow state, people lose track of time and the outside environment.

- The flow state occurs when the challenge of the activity just slightly exceeds our skill level, so full attention is continually required.

- he vicious cycle starts: if you fail at something, you think it is your fault. Therefore you think you can’t do that task. As a result, next time you have to do the task, you believe you can’t, so you don’t even try. The result is that you can’t, just as you thought.

- You’re trapped in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

- To fail is to learn: we learn more from our failures than from our successes. With success, sure, we are pleased, but we often have no idea why we succeeded. With failure, it is often possible to figure out why, to ensure that it will never happen again.

- Failure can be such a powerful learning tool that many designers take pride in their failures that happen while a product is still in development.

- • Do not blame people when they fail to use your products properly. • Take people’s difficulties as signifiers of where the product can be

- improved.

- Eliminate all error messages from electronic or computer systems. Instead, provide help and guidance.

- Makeitpossibletocorrectproblemsdirectlyfromhelpandguidance messages. Allow people to continue with their task: Don’t impede progress—help make it smooth and continuous. Never make people start over.

- Assume that what people have done is partially correct, so if it is inappropriate, provide the guidance that allows them to correct the problem and be on their way.

- Think positively, for yourself and for the people you interact with. Today, we insist that people perform abnormally, to adapt themselves to the peculiar demands of machines, which includes always giving precise, accurate information. Humans are particularly bad at this, yet when they fail to meet the arbitrary, inhuman requirements of machines, we call it human error. No, it is design error. Designers should strive to minimize the chance of inappro- priate actions in the first place by using affordances, signifiers, good mapping, and constraints to guide the actions. If a person performs an inappropriate action, the design should maximize the chance that this can be discovered and then rectified.Our strengths are in our flexibility and creativity, in coming up with solutions to novel problems. We are creative and imaginative, not mechanical and precise.

- What do I want to accomplish?

- What are the alternative action sequences?

- What action can I do now?

- How do I do it?

- What happened?

- What does it mean?

- Is this okay? Have I accomplished my goal? Anyone using a product should always be able to determine the answers to all seven questions.

Research Notes: Apple Bad Design (Donald Norman)

- Once upon a time, Apple was known for designing easy-to-use, easy-to-understand products. - fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty - These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense - Not because this was to be a gestural interface, but because Apple simultaneously made a radical move toward visual simplicity and elegance at the expense of learnability, usability, and productivity. - Do you swipe left or right, up or down, with one finger, two, or even as many as five? Do you swipe or tap, and if you tap is it a single tap or double? Is that text on the screen really text or is it a critically important button disguised as text? - It must follow the basic psychological principles that give rise to a feeling of understanding, of control, of pleasure. These include discoverability, feedback, proper mapping, appropriate use of constraints, and, of course, the power to undo one’s operations. - Yes, gesture-controlled devices, tablets, and phones have easier barriers to initial use.

DISCOVERABILITY

Discoverability, the ability to look at the system and immediately discover all the possible actions, was always a key component to the success of Apple designs. The principle was called "see and point" in the early days (and in Figure 1) because all possible actions were represented by objects such as buttons, icons, or menu list items that were visible to the user: See the action you want to do, point the mouse cursor at it, and one click delivered it. Simply put, discoverability means making actions discoverable—visible—so that they do not have to be memorized. The menus in the traditional desktop computers served this purpose well. Labeled icons do as well. Unlabeled icons most often fail, but the worst culprit of all is the complete lack of any cue. Note that discoverability no longer appears in the Apple Guidelines.

FEEDBACK

Feedback and its partner, feedforward, allow a person to know what happened after an action was done (feedback) or to understand what will happen if the action is selected (feedforward).

People depend on a steady stream of feedback to know how effective their actions have been. In the physical world, feedback is automatic. In the world of software, feedback occurs only if the designer has thought about it. Without feedback, people can be unsure of the current state: They will neither be in charge nor feel in charge.

RECOVERY

Errors happen. Recovery dictates it should be as easy or easier to undo than to do. (Called "forgiveness" in the guidelines and Figure 1, it too has disappeared from the current guidelines.) Recovery was implemented with the command "undo." Undo originated in 1974 at the (then) Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), probably by Warren Teitelman. The Apple Lisa and Macintosh, as is well known, derived their basic structures from the early development work at PARC (Apple purchased the rights from Xerox). The Undo command can itself be undone by means of "Redo." Undo and redo provide a powerful method both of recovering from errors but also of experimenting, trying things out, knowing that test operations can always be undone or redone.

Undo enables a user to recover content. Back is a companion command that enables a user to recover the user’s previous location in a navigational system. The original graphical user interfaces eliminated the user’s need to back up by eliminating navigation. Instead, documents and tools are brought to the user. Browsers and iOS are a throwback to the earlier navigational interfaces, where users wander about a labyrinth of passages leading to modal screens.

Browsers, in supporting the navigational system called the web, provide a Back button so users can move backward in their journey. IOS provides no such generalized tool, so that, for example, if you accidentally fire off a link from inside an app that takes you to Safari or YouTube or any one of many, many other places, there is no straightforward means of recovery. Back and Forward should be standard buttons in iOS so that the interface is forgiving of accidental navigation, instead of punitive.

CONSISTENCY

Most technology users have more than one device, yet the operations of the different devices often clash. Even within the same device, Apple has violated consistency: Rotate the iPhone, and keyboards change their layouts; rotate an iPad, and the home screen icons reorder themselves, with no simple way to predict where an icon will end up.

Consistency is still listed in the guidelines—but it is not followed. The Magic Mouse works differently than the track pad, which is different than gestures on the iPhone or tablet. Why? (Such inconsistencies can usually be traced to designers working away in isolation, never talking with one another. As Conway , the products of a company reflect the organizational structure of the company.)

ENCOURAGE GROWTH

Good design encourages people to learn and grow, taking on new and more complex tasks once they’ve learned the basics. Snapshot takers grow to become photographers, personal journal writers become bloggers, and children try programming and end up seeking careers in computer science. For decades, encouraging learning and growth was the life blood of Apple, a principle so important that it was universally internalized and understood.

Here are all 10 principles of good design:

- Innovative - Makes a product useful - Aesthetic - Makes a product understandable - Unobtrusive - Honest - Long-lasting - Thorough down to the last detail - Environmentally friendly - As little design as possible

Good user experience can only flow from a system where marketing, graphic and industrial design, engineering, and usability all work together in a collaborative effort to make life better, more enjoyable, and more productive for Apple’s customers.