The Design Of Everyday Things (2002) - Plot & Excerpts
An excellent book about how to design usable products. It’s philosophical but backed by plenty of examples (text and images) of good and bad design, including buildings, appliances, and technology. It’s interesting and well-written. I read the 1988 edition, so most of the tech references are dated, but the design principles still apply.My web design business, OptimWise, designs websites for small businesses, so I found this very practical. I liked Norman’s emphasis on simplicity, intuitiveness, and designing for error.I was amused by the Norman’s predictions of future tech. He mentions the portable computer, digital calendar, and "central computer system" (Internet), among others. As a web designer, I smiled when I read that, "the next step in writing technology is already visible on the horizon: hypertext."This book was recommended to me about 5 years ago, and I’ve heard about it several times since. I finally decided to read it because it was listed in A Comprehensive Reading List for and by Designers.SummaryHere’s a summary straight from the book:Design should:t• Make it easy to determine what actions are possible at any moment (make use of constraints).t• Make things visible, including the conceptual model of the system, the alternative actions, and the results of actions.t• Make it easy to evaluate the current state of the system.t• Follow natural mappings between intentions and the required actions; between actions and the resulting effect; and between the information that is visible and the interpretation of the system state.In other words, make sure that (1) the user can figure out what to do, and (2) the user can tell what is going on.Seven Principles for Transforming Difficult Tasks into Simple Onest• Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head.t• Simplify the structure of tasks.t• Make things visible: bridge the gulfs of Execution and Evaluation.t• Get the mappings right.t• Exploit the power of constraints, both natural and artificial.t• Design for error.t• When all else fails, standardize.Here are my notes on the rest of the book. Quotes are straight from the book.Preface"Bad design cannot be patched up with labels, instructions manuals, or training courses.""But appearances are only part of the story: usability and understandability are more important, for if a product can't be used easily and safely, how valuable is its attractiveness?"The Psychopathology of Everyday ThingsThings can have "vestigial" features: features that hang on for generations because customers don’t complain about them, even though they’re not beneficial. Since designers can justify the presence of almost any feature, the vestigial features persist and complicate interfaces."The paradox of technology: added functionality generally comes along at the price of added complexity.""Whenever the number of functions and required operations exceeds the number of controls, the design becomes arbitrary, unnatural, and complicated."The Psychology of Everyday Actions"If an error is possible, someone will make it. The designer must assume that all possible errors will occur and design so as to minimize the chance of the error in the first place, or its effects once it gets made. Errors should be easy to detect, they should have minimal consequences, and, if possible, their effects should be reversible."Knowledge in the Head and in the World"Usability is not often thought of as a criterion during the purchasing process. Moreover, unless you actually test a number of units in a realistic environment doing typical tasks, you are not likely to notice the ease or difficulty of use. If you just look at something, it appears straightforward enough, and the array of wonderful features seems to be a virtue. You may not realize that you won't be able to figure out how to use those features. I urge you to test products before you buy them."To Err Is HumanPrompts that ask the user to confirm that they want to delete something are ill-timed, because the user just "initiated the action and is still fully content with the choice." They are unlikely to catch an error, because they’re confirming the action, not the filename. "It would be more appropriate to eliminate irreversible actions … Then the user would have time for reconsideration and recovery.""When you build an error-tolerant mechanism, people come to rely upon it, so it had better be reliable."What the designer should do:t• Understand the causes of error and design to minimize those causes.t• Make it possible to reverse actions - to undo them - or make it harder to do what cannot be reversed.t• Make it easier to discover the errors that do occur, and make them easier to correct.t• Change the attitude toward errors. Think of an object’s user as attempting to do a task, getting there by imperfect approximations. Don't think of the user as making errors; think of the actions as approximations of what is desired.The Design Challenge"If you don't know any keyboard, there is little difference in typing speed among a qwerty keyboard, an alphabetic keyboard, and even a random arrangement of keys. If you know even a little of the qwerty, that is enough to make it better than the others.""The Dvorak keyboard … is easier to learn and allows for about 10 percent faster typing.""Once a satisfactory product has been achieved, further change may be counterproductive, especially if the product is successful. You have to know when to stop.""If everyday design were ruled by aesthetics, life might be more pleasing to the eye but less comfortable; if ruled by usability, it might be more comfortable but uglier. If cost or ease of manufacture dominated, products might not be attractive, functional, or durable. Clearly, each consideration has its place. Trouble occurs when one dominates all the others.""But with extra features comes extra complexity. Each new feature adds yet another control, or display, or button, or instruction. Complexity probably increases as the square of the features."One way to treat "featurism" is modularization: "create separate functional modules, each with a limited set of controls, each specialized for some different aspect of the task."
I got this as an audiobook, based on the fact that it falls within my usual taste for non fiction and because it's been referred to by many other books. In many ways, this is a classic book that inspired many people to think more seriously about design. At least, that's my impression, garnered from the unreasonably long introduction in which the author talks about how great and important his book is.Confession time: I didn't finish the book. I got down to about the last hour and ten minutes and finally had enough. This book is boring. I spent most of my time listening to it trying to figure out why it was so boring. I like design. I like sociology. I like pop science. I like non-fiction. Why did this book make me drift off and not know what he'd said for ten to twenty minute chunks? I'm not exactly sure, but I've got some ideas.First of all, the book references illustrations. Yes. In an audiobook. I went to my audible account to delete it, and saw that the pdf of the illustrations had thoughtfully been included in the download. So I looked at the illustrations, but they still weren't that great. They clarified some things that I didn't understand, but they didn't add a tremendous amount to the understanding of the text. If the book had been littered with illustrations, with "here's good" next to "here's bad", it might have helped, but then it wouldn't have been a good audiobook.Secondly, the book had too much abstract descriptions and made-up words.Remember when you were in elementary school and they'd have a textbook that talked about, say, the natural resources of a country, and they'd have vocabulary words in bold that you had to remember for the test? But they were artificial, like "grasslands" meant something different from "savanna" which was different from "prairie" This book kinda did that, at least in the first chapters, like he was structuring this as a textbook to teach you principles of good design. His principles sort of made sense, but they had too few examples to elucidate them, and what anecdotes and examples he included often were completely off-topic.The middle to second half of the book got especially off-topic, degenerating at times into a rant about how hard VCRs are to program and DOS computers are to use. Which brings me to my third point: this book is really dated. In some ways it's cool; he describes a smart phone decades before one existed. In other ways, it's not really relevant. He talks about frustrating faucets, for example, he derides motion-detecting faucets as difficult to use because they aren't obvious. Most people these days use motion-detecting faucets just fine. He talks about how awful computers are, but he's talking about a computer that anyone under the age of 25 has never seen. Even if it weren't for the overly-abstract, poorly described principles he wants people to learn from, the age of his observations makes this book not relevant.I don't recommend this book. It's an interesting topic, but this book is poorly written and too dated to be useful.
What do You think about The Design Of Everyday Things (2002)?
Nota per il futuro: ricordarsi di guardare la data di pubblicazione prima di farsi tentare da un saggio con titolo accattivante. Questo interessante excursus sulla non funzionalità del design è del 1988 e cita l'Apple Lisa come esempio di buona progettazione: vorrei sentire il parere dell'autore una volta messogli in mano un iPhone.Esempi datati a parte rimane corretto il suo ragionamento: perché oggetti di uso quotidiano devono essere complicati? Perché si predilige l'estetica alla funzionalità? Il dottor Norman presenta interessanti aspetti del ragionamento umano in funzione ad atti pratici come lavarsi le mani o aprire una porta, spiega come certi preconcetti si mettano tra noi e la cosa che vogliamo utilizzare e spiega, sopratutto a progettisti, designer ed ingegneri, come interagire con l'utente finale. O, perlomeno, come si dovrebbe interagire. Interessante, ma grazie al cielo molti suo consigli sono stati adottati in questi 20 anni e i suoi ragionamenti suonano a volte obsoleti.
—Roberta
Have you ever stood in front of a door, or a microwave, absolutely flummoxed, because the damned thing gave you no clue whatsoever how to open it. If so (even, I venture to think, if not), you will enjoy this book. In clear, coruscating prose he exposes the miserable flaws in the design of everyday objects which conspire to make our lives less convenient, more miserable, and sometimes more dangerous.The book is not just an exposé of the appalling laziness and hostility to consumers that is commonplace among designers(not just in the software industry, which is a story unto itself - see "The Lunatics are Running the Asylum") - it is also a clarion call to action. We need not live in a world where it appears that appliances conspire to make us feel like idiots. And when they do - when you can't figure out which button to push, or whether a door opens inward or outward - remember that you are not the one at fault. It is the lazy incompetent designer of the thing which is making you miserable who is deserving of scorn and ridicule. Far too often, in a design world which favors form over function and usability, crimes against the user get rewarded with prizes and the acclaim of the design cognoscenti. People who presumably never have to struggle with the consequences of their own reckless disregard for the usability of the objects they design. This book is an outraged and eloquent call for change.
—David
This is a fantastic book.The first thing you'll be told, and come to understand, while reading The Design of Everyday Things is that much of the time when you use something wrong, it's not your fault. Those doors that you pulled when you should have pushed, that can opener that never works quite right, they weren't designed properly. As you get over your new found sense of self-satisfaction you'll be carefully guided through the process of how we interpret objects and assume how they're used, and how designers can either embrace their users, or ignore them (to their own, and everyone else's) detriment. I find many books that concentrate on usability to be full of things that I knew, but had left the forefront of my mind. This book was in fact full of things I didn't know, but made sense once I'd read them (and a few times forced me to question wether I'd been paying attention in life to not have realized that already). The Design of Everyday Things also touches on why many items are designed poorly, even when more usable designs are known. Key reasons include "style" (think of those plate glass doors with no indicator of where to push), or cost (many public institutions and large companies select products solely based on cost (ignoring the higher costs of bad usability in the long term)). I think the world would be a better, easier to use place if everyone read this book.
—Paul Reinheimer
