Universal Principles of UX

27

Design for clumsy handling.

Have you ever seen a toddler interact with a tablet? Or a cat? When I gave my baby boomer mother her first iPad in 2012 (her first home computer ever), I was amazed at how intuitively she was able to interact with it. Even complicated tasks—like changing the system language from English to Dutch—she figured out on her own without any involvement from me.

The founder of Fantasy Interactive, where I worked early on in my career, always used to tell us to make all of our designs and interactions feel like Fisher-Price (the oversized toddler toys). What he meant was that we should take cues from the tangibility and high usability of toddler toys and make everything bigger. If it’s bigger, it’s automatically easier ...