Conventions

Breaking away from the norm

What is a convention? According to dictionary.com a convention is "a rule, method, or practice established by usage." We live in a society now where we expect things a certain way. When something is different it throws us out of our comfort zone and we get confused. It also makes us stop and consciously think about what we are trying to do. One convention that I grew accustomed to is using a computer. My whole life I had used PCs and the exit button was always in the top right hand of the screen. No matter what type of computer we had, Dell, HP etc it was always in the same spot. But when I got my first MAC that was not the case. It threw me for a loop the first time I used one. Now I have become used to it and don't have to think about it anymore.

Donald Norman says that "Some constraints rely upon accepted cultural conventions, even if they do not affect the physical or semantic operation of the device." I thought it was interesting how he explained that some constraints are dependent on our cultural conventions. Each cultural has their own way of doing things and certain rules you have to follow. One example he pointed out was that lights are physically interchangeable but because of our cultural constraints they have to be placed in certain places. Red means stop so it goes in the back, white or yellow are head lights so they go in front, and blue is police so it goes on top.

Thinking about conventions they are pretty similar to conceptual models. Last week I talked about doors and the conceptual models that those are. We expect them to work a certain way by using hinges, a knob of some kind, a frame to hold it, and a wall blocking us from where were trying to get to. We have learned how to use doors from experience and we don't have to think about how to use them because we see the visual cues. Donald Norman says,

"the mind is a wonderful organ of understanding- we are always trying to find meaning in the events around us."

Us as designers have a big responsibility to design things in a way that will not only be esthetically pleasing but will also make sense on how to use it. It is always frustrating when you get something that looks really cool but you have no clue how to use it. Conventions are general rules on how things should be and when we break away from those often times the design could fail. So the question to ask is when do you break the rules of how things typically work?