The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
Along with Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think!, few usability books come as highly recommended as The Design of Everyday Things. Originally written twenty years ago, Donald Norman’s book analyses the reasons why people interact with objects and systems in the way that they do and what can be done to make this process easier.
Instead of focusing on more specific computer examples of usability problems, Norman chooses to explain his theories with everyday objects like doors, taps and car radios. This not only allows the book to stand the test of time, but reminds us that usability is not just applicable to software; it’s applicable to everything.
The book begins by looking at the psychopathology of everyday things; the frustration of using normal objects and why they are so often poorly designed. Norman talks about affordances, the difference between the user’s and the designer’s conceptual models, visibility, mapping and feedback.
Even though The Design of Everyday Things was published twenty years ago, it’s remarkable that so many of the issues that he highlights are still a problem today. One example he makes good use of is his office telephone, which is essentially impossible to use because of the complexity of its controls. There are buttons that lack any notion of what they do and sequences of actions that the user must remember to perform even the simplest of tasks. My phone at work is exactly the same; there are numerous mysterious buttons that I dare not press because of what might happen and no instructions in sight to guide me.
Norman then moves on to discuss the psychology of everyday things; common misconceptions, blaming the wrong cause, the nature of human explanation, how people go about performing actions and the gulf between execution and evaluation. These aren’t necessarily things that you would normally notice, but once you’re open to observing them, it changes the way you see interactions between people and the objects they use. One particularly interesting point is that people have a tendency to blame themselves for the failure of technology they’re using. They all too often connect one action to another and assume the link between them.
The Design of Everyday Things then touches on the difference between knowledge in the head and in the world. This is something that I hadn’t really noticed before; how the location of information required to use something has a huge impact on how well you can use it. Take the phone I mentioned earlier; since the knowledge required to use it is not in the world - written on or around the phone - I can’t use it because I can’t remember all of the complex button presses required. If it were better labelled though, I wouldn’t have to commit that to memory and risk forgetting it. The book also analyses the tradeoff between storing knowledge in the world and in the head, in terms of factors like aesthetics, efficiency of use and learning. This is relevant for almost any design in any context and proves to be a useful insight.
Norman moves on to discussing knowing what to do in situations and how constraints allow us to narrow down the list of possible actions available to us. He uses two excellent examples - the construction of a Lego Motorcycle and the use of doors - to illustrate why cultural, physical, semantic and logical constraints matter so much.
The book then continues to show how human error is all too common and why it should be accommodated for, even when users are highly trained and experts within their field. Norman examines the different types of errors and the causes of each, before explaining how to design to accommodate these. The Design of Everyday Things next looks at the challenge of designing with usability in mind and why it’s so difficult to get it right. It mentions the forces that work against good design and the reasons why designers often go astray.
The Design of Everyday Things is extremely easy to recommend. It’ll introduce you to the reasons why we interact with the world around us in the way we do and how designers can create more usable objects using this knowledge. Norman expresses his ideas in a a clear and concise way, using examples and illustrations to great effect. Even after twenty years, this is still an essential read.
Leave a comment