As time continued, society began to accept that technology was capable of assisting an individual in their daily life. People could utilize the computers to write software for the engineers, and make designing quicker for the designers. Designers who focuses on usability strive to decrease the cognitive dissonance, emphasizing speed and decreases the time spent on tasks. Designers who focus on usability can create a product that is more user-friendly and the tasks that the user would need this product or feature would be able to finish their tasks quicker. Not only would decreasing the time spent on the task, if the product is easier to use, the user would not experience as much technical difficulties when using it. By focusing on usability, the designer will minimize the number of errors a user might have while using a complicated system. Usability has become a huge solution to any given design problem; however, there is more design than usability. There is more value a designer can bring than making an artifact easier to use. A designer could also form an active judgement and criticism within the context of a specific design problem. In the book, they gave an example of a phone. So, if a phone is designed to make phone calls, and a designer decides to make the phone more of a social media based phone, then the phone’s main purpose goes away. It is crazy how much a simple design can change the overall purpose of an object. If you change a single thing, the designer has affected the culture dramatically, essentially inverting the established norm and by making a phone more public, communal, and social device.
Design serves as a cultural backdrop for our world. When a designer decides to slightly change an artifact, a user would not notice it; however, that is because these decisions have a delayed impact as they reach the marketplace. A designer can make a variety of design decisions when they create a product, but these products would be delayed as the physical or digital product would go through a variety of completion gates. Not only that, the product would go through a mass production to propagate throughout the world. As a designer, it is important that the product is “finished” before sending out the final prototype because what if there are some other changes that you want to make but you must go over the process again to send a massive amount of information throughout the world. When the products are sent out, consumers are oblivious, and they rarely have the time or awareness to understand how complicated product is affecting their life. It is very important to make the product easy to use. Simplicity is best. It is important to understand your user when creating your product because it could help you in the long run. If you understand your consumers, you would be able to create a product that they would want to utilize. A product is one of thousands or millions of things that can affect a person’s behavior and a single product can apply to an individual’s social norms, genetic predispositions, and various external influences in shaping how someone act, behave, and make decisions.