I use my hair drier every other day. It’s one of those things that I really never think about, but after reading Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, I find myself staring of this object for the first time and thinking there is going to be a lesson here that I can apply to digital design.
First of all, I looked up what a hair dryer is. According to howstuffworks.com, hair dryers are: a coiled nichrome wire wrapped around insulating mica boards with a mini fan (see picture below). This confirmed that a) the hair dryer is a rather simple tool and b) the decision to name this tool based on its function was a brilliant idea. Alternative names could have been disastrous such as: “Heating Nichrome,” or “Hot Nich Blower”
I gave the hair dryer to my husband to observe how he interacts with it. I figured he is a novice user (he’s bald) and I swiftly observed that the hairdryer is actually a pretty well designed thing, which makes it fairly self-explanatory (O.K. probably the add-ons would have been more challenging, but I couldn’t find those).
[Tangential thought: This hair dryer experiment reminded me of Ellen Lupton's book: Design Your Life, wherein she explores the design of every day things such as toasters, bras, curtains and pillows in far more interesting way than I ever could. I attended her lecture at PNCA in Portland, OR earlier this year. It was highly entertaining and informative. I blogged about her lecture here. O.K, back to hair dryers...]
So let’s examine the hair dryer based on Donald Norman’s three principles of good design:
Principle 1: Draw a Mental Picture:
As Norman mentions in his book our mind has an amazing ability to build a bunch of explanations based on very little information. Therefore, an object should give enough information of its function or at least how to interact with it by giving some anatomical cues. When presented with an object like the hair dryer, one can observe that the handle has some ergonomic dents and fits comfortably in our hand, therefore, it is easy to understand how to hold it. This is a wonderful example of how function follows form.
Principle 2: Mapping function to visual symbols
Due to the position of the buttons, one can easily guess that by pressing them an action should follow, this is a good exposure of functions. However, I noticed that my husband (novice user) had to read the buttons before deciding which one to press because two of the three buttons in this hair dryer have the exact same design, the makers had to resort to writing out the functions “heat”, “speed” etc. I think this qualifies as an area for improvement.
Principle 3: Clear feedback
The feedback is pretty obvious and instantaneous, so we can easily guess the functions of the different buttons. When you press a button the hair dryer makes louder noise and blows more air, or another button makes the air blown cooler or hotter and so on. Such clear and immediate feedback allows the user to easily identify errors and quickly correct them.
These principles seem obvious at first, but after we deconstruct them, it becomes apparent that applying them is complex. Understanding how good design works for every day things is useful because after all websites, online tools, iPhone apps, mobile devices, etc. are intended for every day use (or in some cases, every other day).
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