by Paul Pettengill on January 9, 2010
Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated at Amazon
It’s becoming more and more evident to me that I should have gone to design school instead of engineering school. Not that I didn’t love engineering school, ok maybe I didn’t love Dr. Royster (Vibrations) and Dr. Kleinstreuer’s (Fluid Mechanics) classes, but it just seems to me that all the design principles I’ve been learning of late are serving me very well in my day to day work. Design is going into everything I do, its all about putting thought into the why and the how of every task. I must say I’m truly loving putting thought into every aspect of what I’m doing professionally.
I’ve been looking at various sources for design inspiration, and Universal Principles of Design is the perfect introductory book. It contains a two page spread on each of 100 (125 in the latest revised and updated edition) design principles listed in alphabetical order. Each principle has a two-page spread dedicated to it. A brief overview of the design principle is written on the left hand page, and a series of examples are visually depicted on the right hand page.
The great thing about the design of this book is that its easy to browse if you just want to look at the right hand side of each principle, and get a good sense of the principles themselves. That’s what I did my first time through the book. My second trip through the book found me reading each principle in detail, and that’s when I discovered the great use of inline side notes.
Inline side notes appear as typical foot notes in the text body. The inline side notes themselves appear just to the right of the text. This placement makes the notes much easier to reference, and the contents of the notes are great. They aren’t simply esoteric bits of knowledge, but jumping in points for texts that delve into the principle in depth, either the seminal work on the principle or a modern survey of the principle.
Some of my favorite principles:
- Aesthetic – Usability Effect – Aesthetic designs are perceived as easier to use than less aesthetic designs.
- Affordance – A property in which the physical characteristics of an object or environment influence its function. (Think of a handle affording pulling, but not pushing. So if you have a door that needs to be pushed, placing flat plate on the door will afford pushing much more than a handle, and therefore reduce user error).
- Constraint – A method of limiting the actions that can be performed on a system (Think of the 0 to 10 dials of most amplifiers, restricting the actions of the user, as opposed to the Spinal Tap dial which goes to 11).
- Fitts’ Law – The time required to move to a target is a function of the target size and distance to the target. (Think of trying to click on something on a computer screen. It turns out that there are two parts to acquiring a target, first is the large ballistic movement required to get to the general area, and then a series of homing movements to get specifically to the target. Homing takes the most time, so if you can make the targets larger, you will reduce the time it takes to acquire the target. Buttons in the corner of a computer screen will take on effectively infinite height and width as the cursor will stop at the edge of the screen).
- Interference Effects – A phenomenon in which mental processing is made slower and less accurate by competing mental processes. (Think of what happens when something is colored green, but reads “Stop”).
- Progressive Disclosure – A strategy for managing information complexity in which only necessary or requested information is displayed at any given time. (Think of the More or Advanced buttons present on software displays to hide complexity).
Obviously this was just six of one hundred principles in the book, but they’re all great and explained very well.
Kudos to the authors. You can read more about their projects at www.stuffcreators.com/upod
by Paul Pettengill on December 5, 2009
My good buddy
Matt Cheney reached out to me to do an interview with
Ramit Sethi who runs the site
iwillteachyoutoberich.com, who he has been working with on a financial bootcamp project. I’d first heard about Ramit through Matt, who convinced me to buy Ramit’s book,
“I Will Teach You To Be Rich”. I did so, ordering it through Amazon, and letting it sit on my shelf for a couple of months, as I was just recovering from all the books I read for the
Alt-MBA program that we were just wrapping up. I figured I get to the book eventually.
So to prepare for the interview, I read the book. Its a great book for what it is, which is a book guiding you through the basics of getting your financial life in order so that you don’t have to think/worry about money so much. The contents are pretty much the same as the advice that I received in my Personal Finance class I took in college, but then again, that was probably the most important class I took in college.
If you know anyone in college, or graduating from college, please give them this book. It’s written in assessable style, and its easy to follow. It has all the basics around paying off debts, maxing out the 401k, putting things into savings etc. Ramit writes with great anecdotes about growing up in an Indian-American family, and how that culture helped prepare him for dealing with financial institutions. The advice is simple and straightforward, and you can literally follow the books examples when calling creditors and banks to waive fees as Ramit has scripts set up for those interactions. I actually sat down with my fiance and had her call the creditor following the script, and it got us much further than if we just tried it on our own. I’ll update once we have an outcome on the fees.
It also contains great deals like the Schwab Bank Investor Checking, which pays 3 to 5% interest, has no fees, no minimums, no-fee overdraft protection, and unlimited reimbursement of any ATM usage. Which sounded great, but I was like, you know I can probably just stick with my college checking account, because the hassle can’t be worth it. Then I looked at my Mint.com account and saw that I had paid $344.84 in fees since bringing my Wachovia account into Mint (about a year ago). I understand paying for convenience, but this new account will be more convenient, and I’ll save 344.84 in fees. Sweet! I just set up the new account.
Ramit gives a lot of great basics around automating your accounts so you don’t have to think about them, and can relax knowing that you’re saving for all the things you want, and the money that you do spend on stuff is yours to spend. He calls it conscious spending, and its one of the more valuable chapters for people who can get stuff automated, but struggle with staying within their budgets All of this was great advice, and helped me to get engaged on some of this stuff, and I’m someone who already does a pretty decent job at saving for retirement.
Having this background I went into the interview with Ramit, and I found him a great interview. He’s clearly thought about the issues around money management quite a bit. He understands that the biggest thing is just getting started enough to take care of all the details. We discussed all kinds of topics from his take on Taleb’s barbell risk profile (Ramit: too difficult for most people to employ – keep it easy and get people started is much more important), to his take on the similarity between Pick-up artists and financial savings. One of the things that kept coming out for me was the thought that we are not as unique as we think we are, so we should prepare for what is likely. It’s likely that you’re going to get married, and that its going to cost a lot, so start saving for that if you’re young. Hey, if you never get married, you can throw yourself a huge bash when you turn 50.
Speaking of Indians and books, my good friend and former colleague Manish Kumarhas started a very interesting project back in India. He’s started what I can only call a NetFlix for Books called Friends of Books. If you’re reading this from India, I think its a great way to get books delivered to you.
http://www.friendsofbooks.com/
