In this weeks reading we covered The Design Of Everyday Things by Donald A Norman. At its core the reading looks into the design choices of objects and how they are used in a wider and broader perspective. This reading had some interesting points being made, an over-all I largely understood what Norman was trying to convey. How ever one section of the reading stood out to me because I couldn’t quite grasp what Norman was trying to say. ‘The Foibles of Computer Systems’ was a section that I struggled to fathom. Norman comments ‘The abstract nature of the computer poses a particular challenge for the designer’(Norman,1998, Pg 177). With regards to earlier parts of the reading I would tend to agree with what he is saying here. Every computer is different and has their own little tricks and characteristics that can be hard for users to identify. It creates difficulty for designers to try and get their users to engage with their products in the most user friendly way possible.  In this weeks tutorial we expanded on this chapter of the reading extensively and with some help from Nash I started to understand what Norman was talking about in regards to computers. An example that I thought of with Nash was Apple and their products. Whether you like or not we cant ignore the fact that Apple pretty much revolutionised the home computer experience for users on a global scale. And how did they do this? We’ll design is at the core of Apple, everything they make is made to the highest quality as possible but this alone is not enough to get consumers to buy your product. What Apple did was create reform in the software department of their products in a way that no other company was able to do. In doing so it made computers more accessible because people weren’t scared of owning one, people didn’t have to be tech nerds to understand what the product can and cant do. This trend in the software department also meant that they were able to change the way in which people use phones. When the first iPhone was released the app store was horrible, with only a handful of first party apps available. But people saw this App store as an opportunity to create things that their devices weren’t intended for. This is what Norman discusses in terms of affordances and their perceived and actual uses. Apple did not intend for their iPhone to be used as nothing else but a phone and maybe to take some pictures, but app developers started to realise the potential of the platforms they had been given and as a result started to develop apps such as Instagram and Facebook.

Another small thing that apple has done correspondingly is create such a user friendly interface between devices that it essentially locks you into their ecosystem. What I mean when mentioning ecosystem is that apple provides a certain users interface between their devices that seamlessly integrates with their hardware so well. Take someone who has an iPhone for instance. That person isn’t locked into their ecosystem, but they use Apple’s services such as iCloud. Lets say that this person needs to buy a new laptop, Apple know that the person is more likely to buy a Mac Book than a windows laptop because they can reply to iMessage with their Mac, and they can back up and restore information through iCloud. And once you start to purchase more and more Apple products and services the walls to the ecosystem become higher. This makes it harder for someone to break free of the ecosystem to try something else. Apple know that their customers are willing to pay more money for hardware that isn’t as good as something half the price because people are going to pay for the convince of the ecosystem.

This weeks reading: Norman, D 1998, The design of everyday things , Basic Book, New York