November 2025
Intermediate to advanced
270 pages
7h 20m
English
Content preview from The Product-Minded Engineer
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Chapter 8. Interaction Design
Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details to perfect.
Jack Dorsey, founder of Block
Affordances are the ways a product can be used—intended or not. A couch affords sitting, but cats discover it also affords scratching. Both seatable and scratchable are affordances, though only one appears in the manual.
Affordances can be dangerous. Have you ever been to an outdoor concert and noticed that the chairs are tied tightly together? What unwanted affordances of chairs are such ties attempting to prevent? They make the concert safer by keeping the chairs out of people’s escape lanes and preventing them from being hurled.
Due to insecure code and protocols, the digital world is rife with unwanted affordances such as spam texts and emails, privacy breaches, money laundering, phishing, and so forth. In some cases, these were inevitable, but in other cases, more forward-looking design could have prevented the abuse.
Don Norman popularized this definition of affordances in his classic book, The Design of Everyday Things, alongside the signifiers concept that framed the discussion in Chapter 2. If affordances are what a product can do, signifiers are the clues we use to determine what we should do with it.
Though chairs have an affordance of being throwable, there is no strong signifier that they can be used for this. Items that want to show that they can be thrown can signal it with grips, a ball-like shape that fits into a hand, or an aerodynamic ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.