This was alright.

This book came out around 1988 and was updated in 2002. That's not a problem through most of it. there are timeless principles here that will make any designer of consumer goods better at his job. These principles will also help the rest of us to be smarter consumers or just smarter people. I'm a man before I'm a consumer. A...man...I tell you!

It's little dry in places and there were points when it occurred to me that this book would really benefit from an update but if you take it for what it is, it's worth your time.

Ever wondered the reason for Amazon's celestial success? Two words - "Customer Obsession." Right from a warehouse worker to Jeff Bezos, everyone is singularly focused on understanding customers better, making the products which they will love, and taking in constant feedback of their experiences.

On average, we use 42 products every day from CPG alone. Many of these products we don't even think about while using which is a hallmark of a good design - getting us in the flow and rhythm that we don't even think about it. A good design has great discoverability (discover what all actions are possible and where and how to perform them) and effortless understanding (what does it all mean? how is the product supposed to be used? What do all the different controls and settings mean?) at its core regardless of the product being a door, mobile phone or a nuclear power plant.

The author of the book, Donald Arthur Norman, is an American researcher, professor, and author widely known in the design circles for his user and human-centered design works. If you thought that designing was as simple as creating and merging a few shapes and lines then you are in for a ride! Akin to the peeling of onion layers, Donald talks into the first principles of design and then strengthens its position as a unique discipline that brings together technology, psychology, politics, culture, and commerce.

The ending chapter sets the tone for the upcoming decades where we will witness the "Rise of the Small." A renaissance of global talent using their skills to create, design, manufacture, and distribute. We can already see that happening with the emergence of bloggers, podcasters, writers, etc. Even Naval Ravikant talks about it as the permissionless leverage that will create solopreneurs all across the globe. Design is a powerful equalizer tool - "all that is needed is observation, creativity, and hard work - anyone can do it."

The best part about the book is that the several parts of the first edition are still applicable today and will be for the future years to come since the technologies may change but fundamental principles of human interaction will remain the same over time. I'd highly recommend the book if you're in product design, product management, marketing, or even engineering for that matter!

еееее, конец

что я могу сказать - не то чтобы книга бесполезная. нет, какие-то идеи из нее действительно фундаментальны и важны - что если пользователи постоянно совершают одну и ту же ошибку, это ошибка не пользователя, а дизайнера; что если обычное устройство, типа водопроводного крана, требует инструкции - это плохой дизайн и т.п.

но эти вещи легко уместились бы в 100-150 страниц и избавили бы читателя от остальных ненужных двухсот

три пункта, которые раздражали меня всю дорогу:

1) отсутствие логики повествования. тема дверей всплывала раза три-четыре в разных местах, при этом каждый раз про них говорилось одно и то же. с кранами то же самое. принципы дизайна он тоже повторил раза три в разных местах. автор не шел ни от частного к общему, ни от общего к частному - ощущение набора идей, которые запихнул в коробку и несколько раз встряхнули. подзаголовки глав тоже ни о чем не говорили - скажем. прочитав содержание, нельзя было понять, о чем тут будут говорить. в общем, как редактор я фрустрирована

2) очень хлипкая научная база. автор пытался что-то писать о нейробиологии и психологии внимания, но очень скупо, по верхам, без примеров и в неожиданных местах. поэтому все вещи, которые удалось запомнить по прочтении, скорее базируются на здравом смысле и наблюдениях, а не на научных фактах

3) реально заебали примеры техники из прошлого века. первые раза три это, может быть, смешно и трогательно, но на десятом упоминании видеомагнитофона или кассетного плеера ты уже начинаешь орать. отдельно начинали подбешивать мечты автора о будущем, которые он не скупился снабжать эмоциями - "представьте себе это фантастическое устройство, с которого можно будет читать гипертекст, открывая сноски одним кликом" - ну охуенно, конечно, особенно если читаешь эти строки именно с такого устройства! главу про компьютеры я вообще пропустила - во-первых, сложно восторгаться дизайном первого макинтоша по сравнению с компьютерами, управляемыми с консоли, если ты, сука, не видел в глаза ни одного, ни другого. во-вторых, никакие из описанных претензий к создателях харда и софта уже неактуальны. автор щедро полил их грязью - "компьютерщики делают технику для себя, совершенно не думают о пользователе". при том, что в современном мире дизайн и юзабилити встали во главу угла именно в ИТ, и именно ИТ сделало из юзабилистов отдельную профессию, которая потом стала переходить в другие сферы.

я понимаю, что автору в его мохнатом году сложно было это все предположить, но на мой взгляд, если уж пишешь книгу про "дизайн привычных вещей", то бери привычные вещи - те же самые двери, краны, стулья, чайники - и не лезь в сферу техники, которая меняется кардинальным способом каждый год. очень глупо разбирать дизайн какого-то приложения - да пока ты допишешь книгу, ему на смену придет сотня других

в общем, спасибо книге за фундаментальные 3-4 идеи. и стыд и позор за почти 400 страниц.

Sensible thinking, but does come across at times like an 80s observational comedy routine about motion sensitive taps.

A classic for a reason. The examples are dated, but if you still remember rotary dial telephones (maybe over 30 years of age?) you'll be fine with them. Since Norman more or less predicts iPhones and iPads in this book, I'd love to read an update chapter from him in the next edition.

The principles are still accurate and useful, and Norman makes a solid case for why my inability to get through doorways safely is actually the fault of the manufacturers. People using products are busy, they have their mind on other things, and they can't read the mind of the designer. Therefore, if you're in any way responsible for making a product for other people to use, it's worth your while to take a look at how to embed the knowledge of how to use it within the object itself.

Norman covers some of the techniques for this, but you can get that in many other user-experience and design books with more up-to-date examples. What I found most valuable was his way of taking a fresh look at everyday objects, really observing what happens when we use them and wanting to find a way to smooth that path. In future I'll be trying to do the same.

The first couple chapters like every other sentence was worth mulling over and saving.
And the rule that once you think of something it's already behind schedule and over budget is gold.

"Two of the most importance characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding. Discoverability: Is it possible to even figure out what actions are possible and where and how to perform them? Understanding: What does it all mean? How is the product supposed to be used? What do all the different controls and settings mean."

"Because much of the design is done by engineers who are experts in technology but limited in their understanding of people. 'We are people ourselves' they think. 'So we understand people" but in fact we humans are amazingly complex.....the problems with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is not the way we wish it would be."

"Communication is especially important when things go wrong. It is relatively easy to design things that work smoothly and harmoniously as long as things go right. But as soon as there is a problem or misunderstanding the problems arise. This is where good design is essential. Designers need to focus on where things go wrong not just on where things work as plan.Actually this is where the most satisfaction can arise. When things go wrong but the machine highlights the problems then the person understands the issue, takes the proper actions, and the problem is solved. When this happens smoothly the collaboration of person and device feels wonderful."

"The term affordance refers to the relationship between a physical object and a person, or for that matter any interacting agent whether animal or human or even other machines and robots. An affordance is a relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used....the presence of an affordance is jointly determined by the qualities of the object and the abilities of the agent that is interacting."

"The term signifiers refers to any mark or sound, any perceivable indicator that indicates appropriate behavior to a person. Signifiers can be deliberate and intentional...but they may also be accidental and unintentional. "

"It doesn't matter whether these conceptual models are accurate. What matters is that they provide a clear way of remembering and understanding the mappings. The relationship between a control and its results is easiest to learn whenever there is an understandable mapping between the controls, the action, and the intended result." >> grouping and proximity, exploit natural mappings

"Most important is the provision of a good conceptual model that guides the user when things go wrong. With a good conceptual model people can figure out what has happened and correct the things that went wrong. Without a good model they struggle, often making matters worse. Good conceptual models are the key to understandable, enjoyable products. Good communication is the key to good conceptual models."

"The same technology that simplifies life - by providing more functions in each device - also complicates life making the device harder to learn, harder to use."

"Great design requires great designers but... it also requires great management because the hardest part of producing a great product is coordinating all the many separate disciplines, each with different goals and priorities. Each discipline has a different perspective of the relative importance of the many factors that make up a product.... The hard part is to convince people to understand the viewpoints of the others, to abandon their disciplinary mindset and think of the product from the viewpoint of the person who buys the product and those who use it."

"Once that plan failed she had no idea what to do. But she also had a second problem. She though the problem lay in her own lack of ability. She blamed herself falsely."

"When people try to use something they face two gulfs: the gulf of execution where they figure out how it operates and the gulf of evaluation where they try to figure out what happened. The role of the designer is to help people bridge the two gulfs."

"Root cause analysis: asking why until the ultimate fundamental cause of the activity is reached."

"For many everyday tasks goals and intentions are not well specified. They are opportunistic rather than planned. Opportunistic actions are those in which the behavior takes advantage of circumstances. Rather than engage in extensive planning and analysis we go about the days activities and do things as the opportunities arise."

"We also tend to believe that thought can be separated from emotion. This is also false. Cognition and emotion cannot be separated....Emotion is highly underrated. In fact the emotional system is a powerful information processing system that works in tandem with cognition. Cognition attempts to make sense of the world. Emotion assigns value."

"More and more evidence is accumulating that we use logic and reason after the fact to justify our decisions to ourselves, to our conscience minds and to others."

"Feedback provides reassurance even when it is a negative result. Lack of feedback creates a feeling of lack of control which can be unsettling. Feedback is critical to managing expectations and good design provides this. Feedback, knowledge of results, is how expectations are resolved and is critical to learning and the development of skill behavior."

"Human error usually is the result of poor design. It should be called system error. Humans err continually; it is an intrinsic part of our nature. System design should take this into account. Pinning the blame on the person may be a comfortable way to proceed but why was the system ever designed so that a single act by a single person could cause calamity? Worse, blaming the person without fixing the underlying cause does not fix the problem. The same error is likely to be repeated by someone else."

"People may 'know' many things. That doesn't mean they are true."

"In general, people structure their environment to provide a considerable amount of the knowledge required for something to be remembered."

"There is often a logic involved in the choice of unlikely places."

"Some things can only be solved by massive cultural changes - which probably means they will never be solved."

"The ideal reminder needs to have both components: the signal that something is to be remembered and then the message of what it is."

"One way to overcome the fear of the new is to make it look like the old."

"Instead they are often built by assigning the tasks that machines can do to the machines and assigning the humans to the rest. This usually means that machines do the parts that are easy people but when the problems become complex, which is precisely when people could use assistance, that is when the machines usually fail."

"generate numerous ideas - it is dangerous to become fixated upon one or tow ideas early in the process. Be creative without regard for constraints; avoid criticizing ideas..even crazy ideas - obviously wrong- can contain creative insights that can later be extracted and put to good use in the final idea selection....Question everything."

"Well designed devices will package together the various tasks that are required to support an activity."

Always have market and ux research out ahead so when product is interested they can get recommendations already prepared. crossfunctional teams.

"Complex things are no longer complicated once they are understood."

"We are surrounded with objects of desire not objects of use."

I'm just going to be real. This book was incredibly boring. I picked it up because I was told it was a classic of the field and would be useful to have in my reading repertoire. And truthfully, the only reason I gave it two stars instead of one is because of the impact this book has clearly had on the design field. I'm sure at the time of its original release, this book was light years ahead of others in the way that it thought about design. I can definitely see how its concepts have become a main part of every design education.

But ultimately, I thought this book was too wordy. It said in hundreds of pages what, in my opinion, could probably have been said in less. A lot of it is very common sense, in that most people don't even really think about the concepts.

Altogether, probably still good that I read it. But I'd be lying if I said that I didn't skim a majority of it for the important bits.

BLUF: A good-to-great primer on human-centered design, albeit one that's lighter on examples and political introspection than I'd hoped for.

Longer take:
I'll admit: since first hearing about "Norman doors" in college and then seeing the hilarious "second degree burn kettle" on the cover, I'd built up the idea in my head of this book being some sort of righteous crusade against poorly-designed objects. I looked forward to hours of chuckling along as he gave instances of abominably unusable products, starting from the accidental and working his way towards the truly negligent or coercive, skewering each for our edification; by explaining the shortcomings of each example and walking through the process of improving it (if possible), the reader would come to a bottom-up understanding of the principles of HCD.

Fortunately, there are plenty of click-baity listicles to get my design schadenfreude fix, because this is definitely not that book.

First of all, Norman is only incidentally concerned with "objects" per se - the first chapter or two uses a fair number of them to ground the ideas of mappings and physical constraints, but the book as a whole is mostly concerned with the more intangible disciplines of user interface and process design. This actual makes for a more mind-expanding book, as the reader discovers the underlying analogy between the building blocks of physical and non-physical forms of design.

Secondly, contrary to the polemic I was expecting, Norman's voice is actually pretty neutral and empathetic throughout. Rather than casting blame, he investigates failures of design as a whole the same way he's investigated actual accidents: by seeking root causes in broken feedback loops and failures to account for human nature.

Despite a writing style that I'd call bland and curt (I think in the interest of sound neutral and accessible?), I blew through the first five chapters - solid material with exciting implications! However, DOET started to drag for me in the last two chapters ("Design Thinking" and "Design in the World of Business"), which felt less like popular non-fiction and more like a corporate self-help manual. Maybe it's just a problem of audience? The practical workplace material is probably interesting for current-or-aspiring designers themselves, but IMHO, it has far less to offer the casual reader. Worse, it brought to the foreground some ethical issues that the book had until then steered clear of, but without providing any satisfactory answers for.

As far as I can tell, DOET would like its readers to think that its central principles are apolitical: the reader is encouraged to pursue designs that are usable for a wide variety of users based on their size, ability level, and culture, but this is still viewed through the functional lens of creating the most effective products. What does "effective" mean though? I don't want to assume the worst in the author, but the text itself does little to contradict the idea that "effectiveness" is no more and no less than a means towards profitability. Case in point: it wasn't until Norman briefly touched on (and conspicuously failed to condemn) the strategy of planned obsolescence that it occurred to me just how limited in scope his idea of "human"-centered design really is.

Wouldn't a design philosophy that holistically factored in human needs and psychology favor durable, recyclable products with replaceable components rather than products we're forced to discard every year or two, polluting our environment for generations? Wouldn't a human-centered design philosophy content itself with products that served actual human needs, rather than preying on our insecurities to create new ones?

It's interesting to me that Norman used to be an executive at Apple, a company infamous for perfecting the art of planned obsolescence - does he fail to condemn the practice here because he doesn't want to burn any bridges, or because he and Apple are actually in alignment and he sees nothing wrong with it? I'd guess it's not too hard to find out where he stands if you really wanted to know, but within the scope of this book, his failure to take a stance on any political question related to design presents the reader with an unsavory question:

Are "humans" supposed to be the ultimate beneficiaries of Norman's "human-centered design", or are we just a demographic to be focus-grouped as a means of maximizing market penetration?

The Design of Everyday Things leaves it to other books to answer that question, apparently.

A couple of weeks ago a colleague brought some tarts to the office from Art Café. The lemon tarts were white and the coconut ones were yellow. You could see the grimaces on everybody's faces as they bit into what they thought was lemon pie and got a mouthful of coconut instead.

Small details matter.

After reading this you will never look at any man-made object the same. You will question everything from doors to tea kettles to the most sophisticated computer program. The next time you fumble with an answering machine, web page, or light switch you will think back to the lessons from this book. It is almost liberating once you can see beyond the design of everyday things.

I highly recommend this book for anyone. You absolutely must read it if you will ever be in a position to create something (i.e. software, a chair, a cardboard box). If you don't, I will curse your name every time I am forced to use your product!

If you can't figure out how to use a simple device, it's poorly designed. Fancy designs that take away usage cues suck. His prime example are 'Norman doors' (Yes, named for him & his example by others over the years.) those without visibly hinged sides or handles. It can take several seconds to figure out how to operate them. Not a big deal? We deal with thousands devices regularly & poor design means a lot of frustration & wasted time. It can also mean accidents, even fatalities.

Norman started off as a psychologist. I don't know if I noticed his explanations on how we make mental maps, narratives, & our various brain bugs more or if they were new, but they were great. Explains a lot about the difficulties we can have with 'simple' things. He makes this clear in a very readable & often funny way. One example was car versus house heaters. Both have thermostats that power the heat fully on, but they work differently. Turning a house system up high won't make the house heat faster, but it will in the car. Refrigerators & their freezers? Forget about it! When there are fewer controls than functions, problems can arise unless there are cues to guide us, but in this case, he had a terrible problem understanding the system. His has 2 knobs, one for each compartment, but only one thermostat & feedback requires waiting 24 hours. The knobs actually control air flow. Practically impossible to figure out - very poor design.

This was written before the smart phone & the Internet hadn't really taken off, so his views of issues of the future at the end of the book were quite instructive. Often they were right, but I can see how the technology has matured to mitigate some. For instance, he thought writing a text with hypertext would require a team of people, while we do it all the time.

He really nailed feature creep, though. The number of functions that are in word processing programs today are staggering & yet we mostly only use relatively few each. Just too much & only needed in special circumstances. He doesn't mention it, but when the manufacturer doesn't fix basic, underlying issues that have afflicted us for generations & still aren't fixed because development is focused on adding new gimmicks or changing interfaces, it's downright frustrating. (Microsoft Office!)

He glories in some good designs & shows how they matured. He takes us through the car & phone's evolution of form. He really likes his pen, too. It's just a cheap marker, but he discusses all the things the designer had to think of to get it just right. It's sharp enough to write well, the handle makes you want to hold it in just the right place, & it can also be used for sticking into the holes of electronics for resets. All that in a cheap pen!

He ends by saying we should boycott poor design. I wish I could, but our choices are incredibly limited for all the products available. For instance, I'd like an inexpensive car that I could pick the instrumentation on. If I have an automatic transmission, I don't need a tachometer, but they all have one. Why? I can hear the engine rev & have no need to shift. I'd really like temperature & oil gauge rather than a single idiot light that only alerts me when one of hundreds of items are wrong. I can't shut my idiot light up because my gas gauge sending unit is busted & I won't spend $600+ to fix it (drop gas tank & replace fuel pump which has the sending unit built in) since I just use the trip meter to know when to fill up, but it means the warning light is worthless. I had to buy an OBDII scanner to check occasionally. Ridiculous!!!

Anyway, great book & I highly recommend it. Audio probably isn't the best format, although this was very well narrated, since he does have pictures & such. I didn't have too much trouble visualizing most & I did read a paper copy years ago. It would also be nice to look back over some sections. He can say a lot that's worth mulling over.

Table of Contents:
The psychopathology of everyday things
The psychology of everyday actions
Knowledge in the head and in the world
Knowing what to do : constraints, discoverability and feedback
Human error? no, bad design
Design thinking
Design in the world of business.

I reviewed an earlier (1990), paper edition  here. I think that is the same as The Psychology of Everyday Things (1988) which was the original title of the book. Norman changed the title to get it out of the Psych section of book stores, but it does accurately describe the thrust of the book. This is not the latest edition of the book. The latest is a much revised & updated edition in 2013 according to the Wikipedia article.

Finally managed to complete it. Woohooo. Only took 7 years.