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One really great book
Friday, March 04, 2005
I don’t read often. In fact, i don’t even read the text that I’m assigned for school, but this is one book that i’ve read because it’s GREAT!
Not that I’m trying to push a book on you or anything, but this book just speaks to me on so many levels!
It’s called “Universal Principles of Design” by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler. ISBN 1-59253-007-9
It’s basically a culmination of design principles gleaned from various fields of study. The authors’ point of view is that designers used to be more generalist, learning about everything and interrelating those things to produce something useful/feasible. As time went on, designers had to specialize more and more until there seems to be very little discourse between the various disciplines. What you end up having is 7+ methods of getting at the same information or maybe one particular discipline carrying out their study/work without knowledge of a very applicable principle in another discipline.
Here are some examples:
1. 80/20 rule - A high percentage of effects in any large system are caused by a low percentage of variables. Example: 80 percent of a product’s usage involves 20 percent of its features; 80 percent of errors are caused by 20 percent of the components; 80 percent of the wealth belongs to 20 percent of the population, etc.
2. Progressive Disclosure - A strategy for managing information complexity in which only necessary or requested information is displayed at any given time.
3. Scaling Fallacy - A tendency to assume that a system that works at one scale will also work at a smaller or larger scale.
This book is soooo great! Go check it out!