Old v/s New

In his book, ‘Design Everyday Things’, Don Norman has talked about certain principles of good design. Two of several are ‘Visibility’ and ‘Feedback’. It says that in any product, controls should be visible and should provide feedback after being operated. All new designs are coming up with these features and are thus becoming easy to use.
But there are some cases, in which old design used to have these features already but new design, on the contrary, does not have.

When we park our cars, we lock all the doors. In earlier models, lock button was located adjacent to windows. Hence, it was easily visible even when the person is out of the car. Also, proper feedback is given by them. If it was up, car was unlocked and if it was down, car was locked.

In today’s car, this lever has gone under the window, along with other door opening lever. Thus, visibility has reduced to zero from outside of the car. Feedback also becomes irrelevant as the control itself is not apparent. Now, the person has to check all the doors manually, one by one, to be assured whether the car is completely locked or not.

A check which could be performed by just one glance in old designs has changed into a complete task in new designs. And we say, new designs leads to betterment !