Book of the Week: The Design of Everyday Things
12 Dec 2014
The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman started out as The Psychology of Everyday Things, which was published in 1988. For comparison, IDEO, a famous design firm known for advocating design thinking was founded in 1991. This book was very influential when it was published, but after new developments in human-centered design and designing thinking, the material and examples in the book began to look a little stale. I’m reading the 2013 revision of the book that also incorporates topics written about by Don in other books that he’s published. He was also more cognizant to choose examples that wouldn’t get dated as quickly. This book reminds me of something that would be assigned reading to a class. Something you read, digest and talk about. If you want to take a class on the book, Udacity has a course called “Intro to the Design of Everyday Things” taught by Don Norman himself. Why Should I Care About Design?
Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.
Why did I even bother to read this book when there are so many other books to read. I believe that design will have increasing value as technology gets more commoditized. What sets and iPhone apart from all the other Android devices? Why would I pay more money for something that services the same function for less? Why do somethings make you feel good and other things just frustrate you? The difference is design. If you pay attention, you begin to notice the effort that people went through to get the details right. Affordances and Signifiers
An affordance is a relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of that agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used.
The important thing about affordances is that is it not intrinsic to the object or person. It is determined by the combination of the too. Tiger woods and a golf club affords competing in a Masters Tournament. Elin Nordegren and a golf club affords broken windows. Some affordances are obvious, but some are not. Signifiers are indicators for affordances that cannot be perceived to communicate the appropriate behavior to people. Push and pull signs on doors are examples of signifiers. 7 Stages of Action 
- Goal
- Plan
- Specify
- Perform
- Perceive
- Interpret
- Compare
To accomplish a goal, you need to perform an action. There are two parts: executing the action (plan, specify, perform) and evaluating the results (perceive, interpret, compare). Don goes into a lot of details on the 7 stages and overlays different aspects of human psychology over that. The important thing is that in order to design something well, we need to know the steps that a person goes through to accomplish their goal. This gives us places to look for failures. Human Error
Eliminate the term human error. Instead, talk about communication and interaction: what we call an error is usually bad communication or interaction.
Most people blame themselves when something goes wrong, but those errors are really a result of bad design. Self-blame can lead to learned helplessness. It’s not that you’re stupid and can’t learn math. It is because the way you are being taught doesn’t work for you. Although, I think you need to draw a line. You can’t always blame bad design, just like there are people who are truly stupid. Most people aren’t and most problems are due to bad design, which results in human errors. I type stuff on my iPhone incorrectly, not because I have fat fingers, but because the keyboard is too small. Seven Fundamental Principles of Design 
The seven stages of action, lead to the seven fundamental principles of design. Just like how there are seven dwarves. The design should answer all the questions related to actions. These questions serve as a guide. By using the seven fundamental principles of design, we can address those questions.
- Discoverability - can tell which actions are possible and current state
- Feedback - information about result of actions and changes in state
- Conceptual model - have some feeling and understanding how the system works, leading to better discoverability and interpretation of results.
- Affordances - have affordances that make desired action possible
- Signifiers - things are communicated well
- Mappings - relation between controls and actions is obvious spatially and temporally
- Constraints - physical, logical, semantic and cultural constraints guide actions and ease interpretation
Considerations
There is no such thing as the average person. This poses a particular problem for the designer, who usually must come up with a single design for everyone.
I really don’t like the term average. It doesn’t mean much when you’re dealing with real data. If you design for a special person, you might come up with something that is better for everyone. Just something to think about.
Someone else’s kitchen looks complicated and confusing, but your own kitchen does not.
Don has written a book on why complexity is good, but confusion is bad. So this is good. I don’t need to make everything simple, because complexity is needed. What a designer needs to do is to get rid of confusion. I probably made the mistake of trying to make something too simple, when I should have been focusing on reducing the confusion.
In every successful product there lurks the carrier of an insidious disease called “featuritis,” with its main symptom being “creeping featurism”.
Once you get something working, people keep asking for more features. Your marketing people need something to sell with. The obvious solution is to sell the new features. Companies being copying each other’s features. Eventually all competitors’ products look the same and you end up killing the successful product. Just like Obama wanting everyone to learn how to code, everyone should learn how to design. There is a lot in the book, which makes it a good starting point.