The Design of Everyday Things

Reference
The Design of Everyday Things
- Donald A. Norman

Summary
The title essentially explains what this book is about.  Norman starts by explaining how involved and connected device design is with the human mind.  There are many details that go into design that most people don’t talk about, and these are the most elegant and useful parts of the design.  Any device that a person just naturally knows how to use by looking at it is a masterful design implementation.  If the user can start using and figure out a device without a manual and on its design alone, this is a truly successful design.

Another major point was including human error into the equation.  And not only being aware of it, but knowing that errors by the user will definitely happen.  The design, if possible, should have countermeasures to human error, or at least be ready to handle them.  Having a self-destruct button right next to another frequently used one would be a terrible idea.  However, if a clear cover were placed and secured over the self-destruct button, this would at least be aware of the potential error and place some restriction in the design to hinder it.

Choosing aesthetics over practicality is a major and common design flaw.  Norman uses the explanation of an award-winning design that no one can use.  This greatly ties in with the main point of his book, which is to employ user-centered design.  It is perfectly alright to design something pleasing to the eye and with new features people might not have seen before if the design is still manageable to the people who will be using it.  A good system he pointed out was his POET system involving 7 main points: use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head, simplify the structure of tasks, make things visible, get the mappings right, exploit the power of constraints, design for error, and when all else fails, standardize.  Everyday things should be easy to use and practical.  By keeping his POET system in mind as well as designing with the user in mind, Norman believes annoying everyday things can be a thing of the past.

Discussion
Norman’s book was certainly an interesting take on devices many of us interact with on a daily basis.  Before reading this, I never thought too much about annoying devices.  I simply put up with them and took the time to learn their seemingly illogical designs.  But what I didn’t realize is that there was a good explanation to the reasoning behind why these designs are annoying and difficult to use.  On the bright side, this makes it much easier to find and gravitate towards the much better designed products.  I don’t really have much more else to say about his book.  All I can hope is that I can implement his advice into anything I design, and be able to detect poor designs and advise people against using them.  This was a useful book, and it certainly ties in nicely to his other book we’re reading, Emotional Design.

Book Reading 21 – The Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 7 – User-Centered Design
Summary
Norman outlined his POET system with 7 main points: Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head, simplify the structure of tasks, make things visible, get the mappings right, exploit the power of constraints, design for error, and when all else fails, standardize.  He points out more examples of each situation, and how reversing these points can lead to purposely difficult safety mechanisms.  They can also be reversed for use in game design.

Discussion
He tied up his book quite nicely here.  And you could kind of see this whole user-centered design premise forming from the first chapter.  When the user is forgotten as being the main focus of design, products fall way short of what they should be.

---

Book Reading 18 – The Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 6 – The Design Challenge
Summary
As the title suggests, this chapter discusses the main challenges of design.  A few examples are brought in to make the point clear.  Two of these are the typewriter and the faucet.  Many iterations of keyboard layout have been tried, just as many iterations of faucet design have been used.  Norman notes that a major pitfall in design is choosing aesthetics over practicality.  He’s used this quite often in the book mentioning an award-winning design that no one can use.  Often these designs fail to take the actual users into account.  Keeping the user base in mind can alleviate this problem considerably.

Discussion
The last technical paper I read was all about different ways of implementing the keyboard, so it’s interesting how this chapter brought this up as well.  I agree that it’s ridiculous when the design of something most people need to use, such as a faucet, can actually be confusing.  The operation of it is so simple.  I would rather have the design be simple and easy to use than to be fancy looking and more difficult to figure out.  The latter will be nicer to look at, but I don’t see the point in making something complicated to the point where you need to learn how to use it over time.  This is especially true if the device is something simple that is made needlessly complicated by poor thinking.

---

Book Reading 14 – The Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 5 – To Err is Human
Summary
This chapter was all about human error.  It discussed the different kinds of errors and the reasoning behind them.  It also gave useful examples of each.

Discussion
I find that many mistakes happen because you change the normal order of operations.  Think of an action or series of actions that you do, and then remember a time when you made a mistake you couldn’t understand.  Most likely, you did something out of order or inserted a different task in between the normal order of operations.  One time, I poured orange juice into my bowl of cereal.  I don’t remember why anymore, but I know I had messed up the normal way I was used to in preparing my breakfast.

---

Book Reading 11 – The Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 4 – Knowing What to Do
Summary
Norman explains further how the layout of designs affects people’s interpretation of how they should operate.  This time, he used the example of building a simple police motorcycle out of Legos to show the main factors that go into an intuitive design.  Yet again, the world and life experience play a large part in creating a design most people can or should understand.

Discussion
I think everyone has been plagued by the light switch fiasco.  Most confusing ones I have seen have labels explaining which switch goes to what.  His custom faceplate idea seems like a really good one, and I think that should be used more where it might be applicable.

---

Book Reading 8 – The Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 3 – Knowledge in the Head and in the World
Summary
Norman explains how we tend to keep track of information, as well the various methods for memory retention and retrieval.  He gave many examples, such as using the world to supplement data in our mind, and warned people of the major pitfalls of weaker and less reliant memory techniques.

Discussion
He immediately reminded me of how I used to remember driving directions.  For the longest time, I never knew any road names around where I lived.  I could easily traverse the path in my mind, but I could never give directions using street names, and this was annoying for a lot of people.  For everyone’s sake, I eventually learned road names.  But mostly, it made it easier for me to find my way if I got lost.  Mental mapping combined with actually understanding what I was seeing improved my directional skills by leaps and bounds.

---

Book Reading 5 – The Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 2 – The Psychology of Everyday Actions
Summary
Norman brought up the point of people blaming themselves for the fault of hardware and design.  He went into a few examples and explained what goes on in a person’s mind to cause this line of thinking.

Discussion
This immediately made me think of situations where tons of time could have been saved if I or someone else just admitted to not knowing how to use something.  It’s very true that most of us are too embarrassed to admit defeat to a machine.  I want to keep this in mind now and call out machines for being a nuisance more often.

---

Book Reading 1 - The Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 1 – The Psychopathology of Everyday Things
Summary
Norman introduced the main topics of discussion for his book.  He presented the challenges of creating an intuitive design for a device, as well as numerous examples of failures and successes in design.  He pointed out that visual cues to the user can be the most elegant and easiest to understand.

Discussion
This was quite interesting to have the flaws of everyday things pointed out that we are all familiar with.  Like everyone else, I have seen my share of confusing design layouts and wished they had been made differently.  This should definitely be an interesting and fun read.

---