week 6: about face

Chapter 12

Chapter 12 starts by addressing the amount of work a user must put into interacting with an interface and how many designs require too much unnecessary actions from the users. It’s stated how it’s the designers job to minimize the amount of actions a user must take when completing a task successfully. There are four types of work when interacting with digital products: cognitive, memory, visual and physical. Cognitive involves product behaviors and text organization. Memory involves recalling said behaviors. Visual focuses on how the user’s eye is guided around an interface. And physical involves the gestures, keystrokes, and other movements a user makes when navigating a product. Excise work is described as the smaller tasks that must be completed while doing a larger task, it’s the extra work required when reaching an objective. The issue with excise tasks is the effort put into them doesn’t go toward completing a goal. If some of these tasks are eliminated, there is better usability and better user experience. Excise work can be reduced in navigation, between tools, panes, or different screens. Skeuomorphic design can also lead to unneeded excise tasks. It’s important to know when to utilize this style for digital representation and when it makes something harder to navigate and control in the digital world. Following the mechanical representation can ultimately lead to excise. This chapter emphasizes reducing the extra, sometimes confusing work a user puts into interacting with an interface.

Chapter 13

Chapter 13 talks about metaphors and idioms and the part they play in helping users understand an interface. It was first believed that filling an interface with visual representations of objects from the real world would help users grasp and learn an interface easier. But over time, metaphorical designs were having an increasingly negative outcome. With skeuomorphism long gone, we notice a shift away from metaphors, untying the digital world from the physical. There are three paradigms in the user interface world known as implementation-centric, metaphoric, and idiomatic. Implementation focuses on understanding how things work underneath the surface. We must first learn how it works to completely understand and use the interface. Metaphoric is about intuiting how things work. It relies on an interface’s real-world counterpart for the user to understand it. While being a step forward from implementation-centric interfaces, the overall clunky designs became unrealistic over time. Idiomatic focuses on learning how to accomplish said things. It solves the issues with both other paradigms and is based on simple visual and behavior idioms that don’t require technical knowledge to complete a task. This chapter emphasizes the out-dated problems with the overwhelming metaphoric design and how idiomatic interfaces are a better, more widely used format to design with. They solve the problems of other paradigms and once learned by the user, create a successful interface.