posted on
Monday, April 06, 2009 11:45 PM
Recently I read Ambient Findability again. I think that this book is still good today, the same as when it was written, in 2005.
At page 45, Peter Morville, the author, says: "Technology moves fast. Evolution Moves slow."
He refers to Calvin Moores and put our attention to the social context of the users that need to retrieval information.
What's the deal with User interface design?
A lot of famous designer tell to us that the most important thing is designing simple interface. But simple is not the same of "for dummies". It's like something that follows our instinct.
A lot of our action are not immediately rational, we move fast at the beginning of an action (like to retrieve an information from a system) and than we use our rationality to understand it.
The designer has to stay in the middle: the design must be easy to understand and must allow an easy start of operations, but then must allow the user to wander through the design and use his intellect to understand the next steps.
It is very difficult understand the borders and stay within them. There are some books and authors that mark this way to me.
Here some of them.
The theory of Pirolli about Information Foraging. He says that the way humans search information is the same as our ancient instinct to search food and adapt ourselves to the ambient to survive. Information in our daily life is essential to work and live.
Many people that work in the UI design doesn't know him directly, but thought the words of someone else. Reading him is more interesting and better than through the books and posts of many other more famous author that cite him.
- Ambient findability, the chapters about human behavior
- Bruno Munari. He talks about simplicity in design with enchanting way. Anyone of his books about design is good!
- Information Foraging, Peter Pirolli
These tree books are for me more important and useful than the thousands books from famous designers: they let me find my way to design in simplicity without direct laws.
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