undoing unwittingly bad design

Don Norman has a section in The Design of Everday Things where he mentions an interesting principle that I’ve never thought deeply about, and violate all the time. The basic point? Make instructions absolutely clear and simple. Case in point?

On the Gentleman’s Guide I called the email subscription section “Electronic post” and had the button to subscribe labeled “Erudition, please.” Aside from being slightly over the top (even for the voice I use when writing the blog), it is an opaque description of what you get from that button. I’ve already changed that. It’s an incredibly small element of the actual design, and I don’t know that it will actually garner me any more subscribers, but it’s an important step in making the design actually user friendly as opposed to what I perceive as user friendly from my point of view as creator.