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WillowOne's Positions

The Design of Everyday Things

  • Don Norman (1988, as The Psychology of Everyday Things; revised 2013)

Overview

Norman, a cognitive scientist, asks why so many ordinary objects are hard to use: doors you push when you should pull, taps that scald, cookers whose knobs bear no relation to the layout of the rings, and a hundred other cases that leave the user feeling stupid. His answer is that the fault is almost always the designer's. Good design makes the right action visible through affordances and signifiers, maps controls onto their effects in an obvious way, gives feedback, and assumes that people will make errors and makes those errors cheap. The book gave the world the "Norman door", a door whose design tells you to do the wrong thing.

Notes

Here because it changed what I blame. Before reading it I assumed that when I could not work something, the problem was me; afterwards I noticed that the problem was usually a designer who had not watched a human being use the thing. The underlying claim, that "human error" is nearly always a system that invited the error, is the same one that runs through aviation safety and medicine and is correct there too. It is also a book about the gap between how something is and how it signals it is, which is a problem I care about well beyond door handles.

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