The keys to design are perception, cognition, design, and mechanics.
He gave a great example of two different vending machines: one with several simple big push buttons with colorful graphics, another with a collection of buttons involving letters and numbers. The second requires several more layers, and the use of memory. The former makes it as simple as possible.
Fitts’ Law, an important factor to consider in design: it’s harder to target things that are:
(more at wikipedia
Showed a couple of menus: one with a left justified, another that is centered. The one left justified is easier to use because it is anchored to the left and your eye knows where to look.
Design 101 (del.icio.us):
He got into a little bit of heat when he demonstrated the difficulty in understanding a graph by Tufte. Someone suggested that if the point was to demonstrate that war was bad, because of the loss of life, then it would be easier to say they went from an army of 1000 to 10. Who knows, but I get Berkun’s point.
Lists are a great way to provide information; “the cockroach of design.”
Remember to ask yourself, “What problem are we trying to solve?”
Berkun provided an example of tag clouds, and took O’Reilly’s Radar tag cloud. He changed it to a list and added a bar showing the frequency of the use of the tag.
Berkun had a very argumentative crowd, perhaps because it’s on the verge of art, and it’s a little subjective. Or perhaps people are a little narked today; it seems that the change of rooms, cramped conditions, bad wifi, no lunch, food, or drink has annoyed people.
