design-critique

Overview

Based on "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman. Norman's framework: good design makes the right action obvious and the wrong action difficult. Bad design forces users to think when they should act. A critique is not about aesthetics - it's about whether the design communicates correctly: what can I do here, how do I do it, and did it work?

Norman's three key concepts:

• Affordances - what actions does the design suggest are possible?
• Signifiers - what cues communicate where and how to act?
• Feedback - does the system communicate the result of every action?

Workflow

Step 1: Define the user goal

Before critiquing, state: what is the user trying to accomplish on this screen? Critiques without a user goal produce aesthetic feedback, not usability feedback.