Gain Timeless Knowledge Through

Courses From the Interaction Design

Foundation
Estimated time to complete: 21 mins

Do you sometimes feel that it’s difficult to keep up with all the latest trends? From
time to time do you feel overwhelmed with everything you need to learn?

If your answer to those questions is “Yes”, then we have some good news. Our
courses are designed to help you stay up-to-date with all the latest technological and
design-related developments. But, more importantly, they equip you with timeless
knowledge that will help your career progress for many decades to come. If you were
to focus on only today’s technology and design trends, your knowledge would soon
become outdated and you’d end up constantly following in the footsteps of other
designers rather than being innovative and leading the way.

When you gain timeless knowledge and skills through courses from the Interaction
Design Foundation, you will be able to stand on the shoulders of history’s design
giants.

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

– Isaac Newton, who discovered the laws of gravity, was an English physicist,
mathematician, astronomer, alchemist, inventor, theologian, and natural philosopher.
By doing so, you’ll be able to see much more, and much further, into the field of
design and technology—and you’ll also be able to actively draw upon the successes
and failures of your design predecessors such that you create innovative products for
the future.

Another prominent figure in history, Steve Jobs, also believed in standing on the
shoulders of giants, although he worded it in a slightly different way:

Every great artist, every great designer, is influenced by what has been done before
his/her time. It essentially means that if you want to be a great designer, it’s not
enough to look at today’s trends and new innovations. In this video, Steve Jobs
emphasizes this fact by quoting Pablo Picasso, who famously said: “Good artists
copy; great artists steal.”

Copying is, as it sounds, unimaginative, in an industrial or design context. It can result

in anything from ridicule to legal trouble. Stealing, ironically enough, is not anywhere
near as bad—at least, it’s not as bad in a design sense. That’s because “stealing”, in
the sense of what Steve Jobs said, requires you to modify the original item or idea by
adding your fresh, unique interpretation.

Courses from the Interaction Design Foundation will expose you to—and help you
learn from—the very best designs. And we’ll help you make use of that knowledge in
your day-to-day design practice. At the same time, you’ll also learn how to avoid the
worst—and sometimes fatal—design errors of your predecessors.

“Technologists are not noted for learning from the errors of the past. They look
forward, not behind, so they repeat the same problems over and over again.”

– Donald A. Norman, inventor of the term “User Experience” and Chairman of the
Executive Board of the Interaction Design Foundation

By grounding yourself firmly with timeless design principles that explain past design
successes and failures, you will thus be able to prevent the increasingly common
problem of being caught up by the latest trends (and repeating the same, avoidable
mistakes).

Design knowledge based on psychology and sociology

is timeless
You will often hear the phrases “user-centered”, “human-centered”, “customer-
centered” or similar terms, and often used interchangeably depending on the context.

A focus on the human means a focus on human psychology. Technology and design
may change over time, but human psychology—our desires, emotions and
motivations—changes very little. Thus, from a purely psychological perspective, what
made a user interface successful in the 1970s is the very same as what makes one
successful today.
The success and failure of a design is not just about one user sitting in front of a
screen. It’s the result of a broader, more social interaction which means that a
designer must have a toolbox full of concepts and methods drawn from the field of
sociology. Simply put, sociology is the study of social human relationships—and such
knowledge is thus necessary to us as designers.

In a similar way to psychology, sociology remains fairly stable because groups of

humans still have roughly the same dynamics today as they did 100 years ago.
Therefore, design knowledge based on sociology is a stable foundation to stand on,
even when it seems like the world is moving at an ever-increasing pace. That platform
of stable knowledge will be a key ingredient to the success of your personal career—
as well as the success of the companies for whom you work.

Our courses feature examples from different centuries— for example, let’s compare
the two men in the pictures. They live in different centuries with technologies that—
from a technical point of view—are completely different. However, the designers of
each system have applied the very same psychological and sociological knowledge /
methods / concepts / insights in spite of the fact that so many technological advances
have taken place in the decades between the two. Their technology may be vastly
different, but their psychological apparatus are identical, and their needs to get things
done in collaboration with their colleagues (sociologically) are also identical.

The ever-present need for timeless design knowledge:

3 button designs from 3 different decades
A simple button… that should be pretty easy to design, right? Well, as you will see,
that’s not exactly the case. Even a simple button can prove to be a massive design
challenge.

On the upside, the 3 examples below will show that the knowledge required to design
buttons in the correct way has remained stable across 3 decades. And that’s the
encouraging take-home point for you; the timeless knowledge you gain through
taking courses from the Interaction Design Foundation will help your career for many
decades to come!

Button 1 (late 1970s): Press here to avoid a nuclear catastrophe!

We’ll start with an example from back in 1979. The Three Mile Island accident was a
partial nuclear meltdown that occurred on March 28, 1979, in Pennsylvania, United
States. It was the worst accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant history and
was rated a “5” on the 7-point International Nuclear Event Scale. The following
image shows the control room and the wealth of buttons and confusing controls that
turned out to be the cause of the catastrophe.
The control room where badly designed buttons and labels caused nothing less than a
nuclear accident. Here, President Jimmy Carter is touring the Three Mile Island 2
(TMI-2) control room on April 1st, 1979.
© John G. Kemeny, Public Domain

The nuclear accident began with failures in the non-nuclear secondary system, and
was worsened by a valve being stuck open, which allowed large amounts of nuclear
reactor coolant to escape. However, the operators of the nuclear power plant did not
make any attempts to close the valve. Why? Well, a whole team of investigators spent
the following months investigating just that.

During the investigation, they discovered that the user interface in the reactor control
room had big usability problems. Despite the critical valve being stuck open, a status
indicator on the control panel seemed to indicate that the valve was closed. In fact, the
status light did not even indicate whether the valve was open or closed, but only
whether it was powered or not! The status indicator thus gave false evidence of a
closed valve, and when the control room operators were unable to interpret the
meaning of the light correctly, they could not correctly diagnose the problem for
several hours. By this time, major damage had occurred.

As Grand Old Man of User Experience, Don Norman, explains: “The control room
and computer interfaces at Three Mile Island could not have been more confusing if
they had tried.”

In other words, the design of a simple “on/off” button—and accompanying status

indicator—can cost vast numbers of human lives and nuclear catastrophes. And when
they do, we often do not blame “bad design” (which we should) but instead blame it
on the “humans” and call it “human error”. In fact, over 90% of industrial accidents
are blamed on “human error”. If it were 5%, we might believe it—but 90%? That
means that humans are almost always to blame for accidents.

Don Norman sums it up elegantly:

“Pinning the blame on the person may be a comfortable way to proceed, but why was
the system ever designed so that a single act by a single person could cause calamity?
Worse, blaming the person without fixing the root, underlying cause does not fix the
problem: the same error is likely to be repeated by someone else.”

― Donald A. Norman, in “The Design of Everyday Things”

Button 2 (2000): Press a button to decide who gets to rule our country

Our second seemingly “simple button”, and one that drew enormous attention, was
the set of buttons of the so-called “butterfly ballot”, which was used in 2000 in Palm
Beach County, Florida, for the U.S. presidential election. George Bush needed to win
in Florida to become president, and he got some unexpected help from the button
design of the electronic voting system.

In the image below, the Democratic Party is listed second in the column on the left.
However, if you pressed the second button in the yellow column of buttons, you will
actually vote for the Reform Party, listed in the right column. To vote for the
Democratic Party (listed second), you need to press the third button in the yellow
column. Thus, George Bush’s rival, Al Gore from the Democratic Party, lost many
thousands of votes, which instead went to the Reform Party.

Poor designs can lead to confusion and—potentially—chaos and major democratic

problems when large numbers of voters mismark their ballots. Being a designer is an
enormous responsibility, but you should embrace it! Design helps us prevent nuclear
catastrophes and it even helps us get the people we trust to run our countries.
© Anthony, Public Domain

Behold the infamous butterfly ballot, which caused thousands of voters to vote for the
wrong party—unintentionally. After an intense recount process and the decision of
the United States Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, Governor George W. Bush
officially won Florida's electoral votes by a margin of only 537 votes out of almost 6
million cast, and, as a result, the entire presidential election. The process was
extremely divisive, and led to calls for electoral reform in Florida.

Button 3 (2015): Press here to suddenly switch off your engine while
driving at high speed

Let’s take a more recent example of yet another seemingly “simple button”. In 2015,
precisely 13,574 cars of the American brand Lincoln were recalled because the
Start/Stop button of the car had to be moved. The reason? Drivers accidentally pushed
their cars’ Start/Stop button while driving at full speed. Turning a car off while it’s
driving at high speed is hardly the safest move, especially if you’re not expecting it.
The designers at Lincoln had placed the Start/Stop button right below the “S” button,
which stands for “Sport”. Drivers would usually intend to press the “Sport” / “S”
when driving at high speeds, and their attention would obviously be limited because
they needed to keep their eyes on the road. The result was that some drivers
unintentionally pressed the “Engine Stop” button instead of the “S” button right
above it. This meant that they unintentionally—and abruptly—stopped their cars
while driving at high speed.
Lincoln had to recall the 13,574 cars and then move the button to the top of the
column of buttons – as a kind of “usability patch”. By placing the “Sport” / “S” at
the very opposite end of the column, they lowered the likelihood of the drivers’
accidentally pressing “Stop engine” while driving at high speed.

The Take Away

The examples we have provided above are not only incredibly interesting to examine,
they also provide valuable learning points that tie back to how we create our courses.

They show that designers have, time and again, committed design mistakes because
they have ignored or overlooked the way our minds operate. They underscore how
important it is for us, as designers, to take into consideration human psychology and
sociology. Sometimes, a simple design flaw can cause an extremely costly disaster!

The examples also show that design is way more than learning about the hottest
trends, but also taking a considered look at past successes and failures and then
distilling timeless design principles from them. This goes back to why we started the
Interaction Design Foundation, and why we chose to focus on imparting timeless
principles rather than chasing the next big design style. Many principles of great
design are universal and timeless as they are based on psychology, sociology, studies
of our present and past technology, as well as the interaction between humans and
technology. Not even the design of a single button is an easy win—but it can be, if
you have the right knowledge!

References & Where to Learn More

Hero Image: Copyright holder: Rikke Friis Dam. Copyright terms and license: CC
BY-NC-SA 2.0

Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, Introduction, page xv, 2002

Isaac Newton, Letter to Robert Hooke, 15 February 1676, The phrase is most famous
as an expression of Newton's, but he was using a metaphor which, in its earliest
known form, was attributed to Bernard of Chartres by John of Salisbury.

Don Norman, Human Error? No, Bad Design, https://jnd.org/human-error-no-bad-

design/

Steve Jobs, World Wide Developers Conference (online video), 52:15/52:22, May
1997

Backgrounder on the Three Mile Island Accident, 2014, http://www.nrc.gov/reading-

rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.html

Per Curiam, SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES, GEORGE W. BUSH,

et al., PETITIONERS v. ALBERT GORE, Jr., et al., 2000,
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-949.ZPC.html