THE DESIGN OF EVERYDAY THINGS
You've stood in front of a hob, completely stumped about which knob controls which burner. You've pushed a door that clearly wanted pulling. You felt foolish. Don Norman's classic text argues, quite convincingly, that you shouldn't have. The real culprit is poor design, not the person struggling with it. It's a surprisingly freeing idea. Norman draws on cognitive psychology to explain why so many products fail their users, pointing to problems like hidden controls, arbitrary connections between a function and its trigger, and designs that place an unreasonable burden on memory. Short on feedback, short on logic. The result is frustration dressed up as user error. The fix, it turns out, follows a fairly clean set of principles: keep things visible, build on intuitive relationships between controls and their outcomes, and use constraints cleverly to steer people naturally towards the correct action. Simple to state, harder to execute, and almost universally ignored in bad design. This book works both as a practical guide for anyone involved in creating products and as a genuinely engaging read for curious minds who've ever wondered why so much of daily life feels unnecessarily fiddly. Norman has a gift for making you see the ordinary world with fresh, slightly indignant eyes.
- Author: Don Norman
- Publisher: Basic Books
- Genre: Family & Relationships
- ISBN: 978-0465050659
- Pages: 368 pages