(3.0) Not as educational as The Design of Everyday Things

Feels fluffier, less concrete, more repetitive (e.g. keeps coming back to autonomous driving (well, makes sense, he's funded/paid by Ford and Toyota at time of writing) and doesn't really add more as he does so). Feels like a rehashing of Everyday Things with just the added complication that the technology/devices/products now are "intelligent" and help automate things that humans would otherwise have to do (or couldn't possibly do) on their own. This does present design challenges, but we stay way too high-level for this to carry much weight. I do give him credit for keeping it relatively short. Some journalists I've read would've dragged this on 50% longer.

(5.0)

Can't believe I hadn't read this before.

There's a lot of wisdom in this book. I'd highly recommend for anyone pursuing a career in design, product, marketing, or tech, or anyone who just wants to build great products.

Internalize these ideas and put them into practice and you will create better products that will impact people's lives.

As a kid, there was this coin purse my grandmother owned that despite me exerting all efforts to pry it open, even with repeated demo, when I had my hands on it, it just would not. It had this kiss lock clasp, which now I suppose, apart from style, was a clever design (See chapter: Deliberately Making Things Difficult) to safeguard the coins from turning to knick-knacks.

Here we have this oft-blurted self-deprecating jest when we could not or fail to figure out how to operate an object no matter how ordinary or intuitive it should work: "Pasensya na, wala nito sa bundok." (Sorry, we don't have this in the rural).

This is one of the very points that the author consistently stresses throughout: That in majority of cases, it is not the user that is at fault but the design; the design that stuck with every consideration to engineer and market it but fell short in uplifting user experience.

As a process and systems engineer, I commit this mistake myself. And I agree it is the design of machine and processes that must adjust to users, not otherwise; what the book refers to as human-centered design (HCD).

The examples in here are very relatable with the aid of illustrations and diagrams. This is for every reader who perpetually tries to learn the right switches for which lights in their own home. For us end-users, humans, for whom the design of everyday things should focus on.

n  

n    n      "...enjoy yourself. Walk around the world examining the details of design. Learn how to observe. Take pride in the little things that help: think kindly of the person who so thoughtfully put them in... If you have difficulties, remember, it's not your fault: it's bad design." n    n  

n

تو تجربه کاربری این کتاب یکی از اولین کتابهاییه که توصیه میشه خونده بشه. خیلی نکات جالبی هم میگه
در حقیقت یه نکته خیلی مهمی که وجود داره اینه که واقعا خیلی از خطاهای انسانی به خاطر طراحی بد اتفاق میوفته... نویسنده تو این کتاب انواع مثال ها رو میاره تو توضیح بده که دیزاین اشتباه چیه و منجر به چی میشه

من از کتابش خیلی خوشم اومد فقط عیبش این بود که کتاب قدیمی بود و بعضا مثال هاش با واقعیت تطبیق نداشت. از طرفی تلاش کرده بود تو ویرایش جدید یه کم از اینترنت و این چیزا هم بگه ولی نتونسته بود خیلی خوب کاور کنه...
حتما ولی خوندن این کتاب رو توصیه میکنم

This work did not meet my expectations. I had the idea that it would highlight, perhaps, the interesting history of the design of commonly encountered objects and, indeed, there are a couple examples in the book. But a better title would be something like "The Norman Philosophy of Design" or "Suggested Approaches for the Would-Be Designer".

Norman seems to me to be quite full of himself and offers several of what I would consider to be unsupported (and unsupportable) statements in the manner of Hoffer and Nietzsche. This is not to say that Norman is wrong in his general approach and philosophy of design; on the contrary, I would say that he is for the most part correct.

In the end though, I had to force myself through to the end of this dry work. It is not a read for the casual reader looking for light but informative entertainment.

(4.0) Some good stuff in here, though it's certainly dated

I'll be looking up some of his other books to see if he's as good at predicting and suggesting product improvements as he was back then.

I think he makes concrete some really common sense ways to approach and analyze designs of products that humans use. It's certainly entertaining to point out ridiculous products, interfaces etc., but that's kind of 'negative design': what not to do. That doesn't actually help you do it right. Fortunately, he does spend a fair amount of time on how to do it right. So some good stuff to summarize:

* Make the controls/interactive elements visible: they won't used if they're not noticed
* Use cultural, intuitive clues to suggest the function of elements...e.g. choose materials, shapes, colors appropriately
* Try to make the interactive elements map to the functions they perform, particularly easy if there is some spatial component to what is controlled, arrange the elements in the same arrangement as their actions
* Think of the steps that will occur when a user interacts with a product:
-- user forms a goal
-- user translates the goal into smaller, more concrete 'intentions'
-- user enacts the intention as best he can
-- the system responds
-- the user tries to interpret the response
-- 'bugs' can occur anywhere in this chain, identifying the source can help identify the solution
* Make sure there's feedback when user does something. If the product's state has changed, make sure user can tell. Readable displays can be helpful here
* Users will make mistakes. Expect them and make them reversible, low impact
* If you need instructions for new user to operate, you're probably doing it wrong
* Try to use constraints to limit the wrong actions user can take
-- e.g. 3.5" floppy disks can only be inserted one way into drive (though they look square and top not much different from bottom)
-- cultural constraints can be used as well as physical constraints
* as last resort, turn to arbitrary standards (so even if something not intuitive, user only has to learn once and can apply to all similar devices)
-- e.g. QWERTY keyboard
* how to use technology best to improve products/processes:
-- simplify tasks, but leave them largely the same (don't automate away key steps that users will forget occur and can't troubleshoot when something's wrong)
-- make things visible that weren't visible before so state is easier to track
-- design for error, don't blame "human error" when unintuitive/broken interface leads to disaster (e.g. three mile island)

So I think a few of these can be explicit steps to take when evaluating a design:
* are the relevant features visible? is feedback visible?
* is it clear what the mapping is from interface to resulting actions?
* when user interacts with each control, is there appropriate feedback?
* can user identify when he's made an error? can he undo the error? are the 'human errors' ever catastrophic?
* are there constraints you can apply to reduce possibility of error?

He also made some cool predictions/product requests, which makes me want to read some of his more recent stuff:
* the windows/macintosh user interface would take off
* calendar/reminder book would be electronic and fit in your pocket (but didn't think they'd BE the phone...talked about connecting the calendar to the phone...but well on his way to asking for the smartphone)
* how big hypertext would get, mostly in the context of books/media...not sure he really thought of the Web as the logical extension though
* it also seems that his line of thinking was adopted into the types of user testing that i'm familiar with...let naive users play with the product with no guidance and see what sense they make of it. what mistakes do they make? when were they surprised by how the product behaved? why?

Only negative bits were that there was some material in the middle about theory of mind, memory, psychology of errors etc. that I didn't think was all that relevant. Interesting, perhaps, but a little out of place.

I try to read a piece of somewhat respectable nonfiction every month or so, which means I’m always vaguely on the lookout for titles that seem interesting and which aren’t either inspiration porn or just some random New Yorker’s collection of personal essays. I first heard of Design in an editorial in a local paper, which described it as a ‘seminal read’ – the basic conceit and title both seemed interesting so I through it on the list and, however many months later, finally got around to read with it. It was interesting, but altogether a dense and more technical read than I was at all prepared for when I picked it up.

The book is about what it says on the tin – looking at the processes and practices of industrial design and how it can be best applied to create useful, pleasurable tools. It is very much written for an assumed audience of at least interested amateurs or casual practitioners, with lots of specific practical tips and guidelines for the working designer to apply to their own projects. For the same reason it isn’t at all shy about the jargon or business-school models and charts.

Design, from the book’s perspective, covers an extremely broad field – everything from the physical structure of a tool to the stems and procedures that should be followed for its safe operation to the aesthetics and layout that give the most enjoyable and frictionless user experience handling it. The book considers it principles equally applicable to designing physical products and bureaucratic systems, and is mostly even convincing as it says so. That said, it absolutely assume that whatever is being designed is being designed by a large, multi-team project with budgets and stakeholders, and designed for sale on the private market, both of which do shape the advice given quite clearly (the entire final part of the book is about ‘designing in the real world’ and about these exact conditions).

The prose is written with the precise tone and cadence of an above-average but not great professor giving a long, rambling lecture that illustrates every single point with a tangential personal anecdote – though my mind may only jump to that comparison because that’s basically what this is in book form. It is not, being honest, ever exactly gripping or a page-turner; this was probably the book whose reading felt most like homework of any I’ve opened so far these year. Something not at all helped by the fact that the field of industrial design does the same thing as every other slice of academia and redefines a bunch of very common nouns to be very precise and occasionally very counterintuitive terms of art (though in fairness the book could have been much worse about this).

That aside, I did find the jargon mostly helpful, in terms of clarifying and separating out concepts. The distinction between capabilities (what a given device can be used for) and signifiers (the implicit or explicit ways a device presents itself to be used) is useful and pretty easy to keep in my head, for example.

The initial chapters of the book are primarily about the theory and best practises about of designing specific, physical things – for example, how it represents a shameful failure for a door to ever require a sign or instructions on how it should be opened. This was probably the roughest part for me to get through, just because I felt like I should be taking quizzes or filling out worksheets to make sure II remembered everything correctly as I went – the sections get dense. It was fascinating reason to bludgeon through though, if only as a collection of the most practical insights yet provided by the study of human psychology. None of the best practices and recommendations given – never require the user to input more than a few commands without feedback or guidance, map the layout of controls to correspondent to the physical ordering of the things they control, mechanical commands should feel like they have some sort of intuitive relationship to their effect, that sort of thing – exactly blew my mind, but it was interesting to see them laid out. Also interesting how much a lot of them contrast so strongly with the minimalist, ‘clean’ aesthetic which actually governs the design of so much these days.

The sections on mistakes and accidents were probably the most interesting and compelling in their own right, at least for me. Maybe just because I found the examples more intuitive, or maybe just because industrial accidents and airline disasters are more attention-grabbing examples than confusing and inefficient light switch layouts. In any case, the typology of mistakes versus errors (basically: whether you are trying to do the wrong thing, or trying to do the right thing and just failing in execution) and their subcategories seem genuinely quite useful, as do the various meditations on how to make both types less common.

This is also the section that has stuck with me in the most detail, if probably just because it seems like it might have some direct relevance to day-to-day life. Most especially the idea that focusing on how to assign fault or blame is the most useless possible thing to do when trying to investigate an accident – it only makes everyone motivated to hide any involvement they might have had, and lets you stop thinking about it as soon as you decide who is responsible without ever digging into the actual causes of the mistake. ‘Human error’ is, in Norman’s view, a mirage – if people are making dangerous or expensive mistakes at any appreciable rate, then that is axiomatically a failure of the systems which should be supporting and guiding them.

The fact that airline disasters are drastically overrepresented in the case studies used because the investigative infrastructure for them is uncommonly (almost bizarrely, really) well-designed and diligently maintained in the US is also just a fun bit of a trivia.

The third part of the book is about the actual process of designing something in a large organization. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is mostly about bureaucratic politics and navigating frictions between, say, the design and marketing teams – the offered distinction that design is about making things that are useful and good whereas marketing’s input on the process is ensuring it is something that people will be willing to buy is pithy and memorable, if perhaps one that people on the marketing team might not be entirely happy with. This, along with terms like ‘the double-diamond design process’ and the oft-repeated saying that ‘the day a project starts it’s behind schedule and under budget’, and the gratuitous use of Japanese, all left me with the uncanny feeling of walking into an MBA seminar.

This is in fact an extremely famous and successful book – I know, because this is a heavily revised second edition, and the new material never missed a chance to say so. Having come out in 2013, the updated material – overwhelmingly about software UX, the internet, and smartphone design, because of course it is – is already somewhat charmingly outdated. The additions did include a long and very interesting section on changing standards, standardization, and when it is or isn’t worth the massive disruption involved (including a fascinating if probably not entirely trustworthy digression into the history of the QWERTY keyboard), so on the whole I’m happy I got this edition rather than the original from the ‘80s.

Overall, not a book I’m likely to open again anytime soon unless I end up making a dramatic change of careers, but interesting enough that I don’t at all regret reading it.

Взялся за книгу под ложным впечатлением от обложки и пары ревью: будто она действительно посвящена рассмотрению дизайна повседневных вещей, что, как я подумал, было бы достаточно увлекательно.

Реальность оказалась не то чтобы полной противоположностью (дизайн повседневных вещей на конкретных кейсах действительно разбирается, но это случается иногда и мимолётом), но это больше систематизированный материал для людей, так или иначе сталкивающихся в профессиональной работе с проблемами дизайна: это, пожалуй, ограниченно полезно для меня — что-то я постарался запомнить, но продираться через очень монотонное изложение было мучительно.

For a book that a lot of people rave about as being a 'bible of usability', I have to say it was one of the worst written and designed books I have ever been unfortunate enough to read.

This book is amazing. You'll never look at another door or faucet in the sameway.
If you take anything from this book, it is these 7 principles of making a difficult design task an easy one.

1. Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head.
2. Simplify the structure of tasks.
3. Make things visible: bridge the gulfs of Execution and Evaluation.
4. Get the mappings right.
5. Exploit the power of constraints, both natural and artificial.
6. Design for error.
7. When all else fails, standardize.

Altough, the reason for the 4 star reviews, is that the book is a bit outdated. Not the design principles, even after 20 year since the book was published, some things are poorly designed. But the book use examples like telephones and the future of publishing, like Hyperlinks(!).

Donald A. Norman writes a series of essays about how the design affects the usability of commonly used items, to introduce readers to the field of usability design. The author includes essays about the distinctions between psychology of everyday objects and everyday actions, knowledge in one's head and knowledge in the world, knowing what to do, human error, the challenge which defines design, and a description of user-centered design. This book is written for an audience seeking an introduction to user-centered design, and they will find a collection of memorable examples with explanations. However, practitioners (and other already familiar with design) may criticize the book for its lack of depth; but, this book was not necessarily written for them.

I think there is really only one gif to sum this book up properly:


This book, although the examples are dated (as listed in nearly every review), is quite fabulous. The original title was actually "The Psychology of Everyday Things" which was less friendly to the average person, but quite accurate.

Like I said in a previous update, I feel like this book should be required reading for any type of designer, but somehow I had missed it until now. Great detail about design methodologies, constraints, and psychology - but not too much to be overwhelming (in my opinion). The examples, while dated, were still quite excellent (assuming you were born pre-2000s but hey you can google things). Since I listened to the audiobook (on Hoopla) I missed out on the diagrams which is disappointing, so I think I recommend reading the actual book. (However, I quite enjoyed the narrator, Peter Berkrot.)

I think that the younger generations (like myself or maybe this is just applicable no matter the period in history) assume that older people or even people their own age who don't understand technology are dumb. I know I've felt that. While working in a game dev company, we often expressed how stupid our users were, because things seemed obvious to us. It was great to hear his thoughts on how it's not your fault you can't figure something out, it's the designer's. I think anyone who has ever made something needs to hear that. You made it, you have a mental model of how it works, of course it seems intuitive to you. He also goes into the difficulties designers face in getting to a good design and the struggle to keep a good design from being changed along the way.

I do think there were a few times he oversimplified things as far as challenges designers face, but overall he seemed to take a fair stance. It was especially fascinating to hear his "theories" on what computers would become (this was written in '88) and compare them to what HAS happened so far. He's often quite spot on, though I'm not sure how many of those things he helped MAKE happen. ;)

BLAH BLAH BLAH, IT'S GOOD. If you're a designer, a must read. If you aren't, it may be a little dense but still worth it if you're interested. Definitely will at least help you figure out how to look out for good design in the products you buy.