Vlad,
In a very real sense, this is in fact the rubric that I came up with at the University of Maryland to give my students and we now use it at FiscalNote. This is a good rubric for a product design team to use, but it’s not going to be an easy to understand rubric without a lot of other knowledge and training.
To properly utilize this rubric, it is recommended that one have a deep knowledge of user experience and product design. There are several readings one could do in this area.
I am in fact teaching Design of Everyday Things (DOET) to my students, and Norman goes over some of these concepts very well (and I have all of my product designers read it too). However, Norman does not have a design critique rubric like this, and there are a lot of concepts here that you will not find in DOET.
Norman is very good at explaning affordances and signifiers. Anyone looking for a good understanding of those terms would do well to read chapter 1 of DOET, where Norman explains these concepts in detail, but he, however, did not come up with these terms.
This rubric is not meant to explain concepts to people. This rubric is meant for someone who understands these concepts and to use as a way to guide themselves when critiquing a product.
If a person reads this critique and doesn’t understand the concepts and terms presented here, they are not ready to use this critique (and they do not understand what makes for good product design), and they have additional reading to do.
DOET is a good start, but it is not nearly enough.
Linked to within this rubric is my Guidelines for thoughtful product design that includes a lot of additional concepts that any critique should keep in mind.
In that post, I specifically mention that I own a debt of gratitude to Norman, Rams, and Shneiderman for their previous writings on this. I came up with my own guidelines because I needed something that bridged the gap between all of theirs (and filled in the holes that I saw when designing products) and that was specifically created for a world where many of our products are both physical and digital.
