The Product-Minded Engineer

Chapter 2. Guiding Users Through Your Product

It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.

Don Norman, in The Design of Everyday Things

The user of your product is your hero. As in a work of fiction, you are rooting for the hero to get to the end and accomplish their goal.

Unlike a fiction author, the product designer’s goal is to make the user’s journey easy. Guided by scenarios, you’ll provide signposts at the right places and the right times to help them on their path.

In his classic book, The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman refers to such signposts as signifiers. Signifiers are clues in your interface as to what the feature does. There are innumerable examples of signifiers:

• A name or icon to signify a purpose

• A bounding box around a button to signify you can click

• A downward-pointing caret to clue a dropdown menu

• A radio button, signifying that at most one option can be selected

• A set of checkboxes, signalling that multiple options can be chosen

• An underlined blue hyperlink, showing that the target is a web page with the text clarifying the relevance or name of that page

• An error message suggesting what a person should do

and so on.

This chapter explores the concept of signifiers and their role in the user’s journey. Through them, you’ll learn to craft polished interfaces.

To start with, I’ll introduce a case study about hierarchical menus, ...