Arrt 337 Feedback

It's about time I had a journaling marathon.

The book we were supposed to read for the semester, Design of Everyday Things is littered with information on feedback. That should tell you something about how important it is to interaction design, or product, really. Most of us have heard the word "feedback" before and usually relate it to radio or sound waves, or can recall a time when a microphone squealed. Feedback in a design sense is similar, but in most cases it is less painful to your ears.

According to Donald A Norman, feedback is the information about what action has actually been done, or what the user has accomplished. This can be related to thousand of everyday things. You can turn the door knob and the click will indicate that you can push the door an it will open. Electronics give off feedback as well. Shut your dishwasher and twist a dial and the machine wiring to life indicates that it has started. Imagine every reaction that you have experienced because of an action you have made. This is feedback.

Donald Norman also spends a little time explaining that sounds are also a for of feedback. It's a clue that something has happened. The elevator, the toilet, most computer and video games have some sort of audio feed back. Even though you are seeing what it happening, audio feedback is just as important.

There are many different types of feedback, and really all you need to do is think about the 5 senses.  Visual, audio, tactile, I don't know the formal names for smelling or tasting, but you get the idea.  

If a user does not hear a sound or have some sort of feedback, they will usually assume that nothing happens. In class we watched the video "A day made of glass" and there are lots of pros and cons to the ideas expressed in the video. And one of the cons about having a world made of glass is that there is no tactile feedback. Our hands are full of nerves and senesces so many things. Through our hands we can feel weight, surface texture and so on. Think about what we wouldn't know if we didn't touch anything?


Visual feedback is important to interaction design because that's basically the only thing we've got to work with. Imagine that you are searching and the internet is being particularly slow. As you page is loading there is usually some work of "loading" page or at the very least your mouse changes. If you didn't see that change, or some sort of spinning wheel, you would begin to wonder if you page was even loading! So as UX designers, we need to be thinking about what changes or indications we need to make so the users will know that they are doing the right things, or anything at all.