Reading "The Design of Everyday Things"

Life so far

It's been a tough 2022 so far. I'm burned out at work, my grandpa is ill, my old car broke down, etc. Hence the general lack of motivation to write anything. I feel like this year will be learning year for me, where I get my ass handed to me by life, and I come out of it battered but more mature.

In this vein of learning, I've been trying to institute a few changes in my life to help alleviate some of the things that are going on in my life. Basically, try to stay in control of my life as much as I can. A few basic ones:
  1. Work exactly 8 hours a day and push back on deadlines that would require working more than 8 hours a day.
  2. Write every so often. In my blog, in my random notebooks.
  3. Keep in contact with family.
  4. Keep my girlfriend in the loop about my stresses and struggles (she's a psych major!)
  5. Always be learning something new.
Let's hope everything works out! *knock on wood*

Reading "The Design of Everyday Things"

In terms of my goal to always be learning something new, one thing I want to do is learn how to design. There's a pretty common stereotype that engineers don't know how to design for humans, and that is a pretty big tragedy since all customers are humans (even APIs are designed for human engineers). I'm hoping that I can learn two things:
  1. How to design a product (mobile app, kid's toy, etc.) well.
  2. How to design an API or SDK or library well.
There's already been a few great learnings from the book! In this post there's one I would like to ponder for a bit:

The mental model

This is how users believe your product is working underneath the hood. This influences how users will interact with the interface/controls of your product. For example: I am building a heater with a dial that has all the temperatures from 32F to 100F. A totally valid mental model might be that the heater takes the desired temperature, subtracts the current temperature, then applies a proportional amount of power. In other words, the higher you turn the dial, the more power goes to the heating coils, and as you approach the desired temperature, the heating coils ease off. A user who believes this mental model will crank the dial up to 100F if they want to heat up faster. From what I've read so far, the best design should guide the user's mental model to be the one that the designer and implementer have in mind.

I think the idea of the mental model really advocates for simplicity. If the mental model the developer has is obvious and simple, then it is more likely to match the mental model the user has when they use it, because it's obvious! When I am trying to build my products, here's something that I'll try to consider in the future:
  1. What is the user's mental model going to be when using this feature?
  2. What is a fellow engineer's mental model going to be when improving on this feature in the future?
If we (product, design, engineering, and user) can sync up our mental models of a particular product, I think there would be a lot of benefits. During design and ideation, this would mean that everyone has a sense of what is hard to build and what is easy to build. During usage, this would mean that the user feels like this product is intuitive to use and feels like an immediate expert. I will try to bring this possible innovation into work for the next product we build!

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