Wow! I was his student many, many years ago. I had to take his class because he was the head of our department. I thought I was going to do something very di

Wow! I was his student many, many years ago. I had to take his class because he was the head of our department. I thought I was going to do something very different with my life and I wasn't very interested, except that he was a great lecturer. In retrospect he was easily the most influential professor I ever had. If his work in something like "Design of Everyday Things" seems underwhelming I would guess that is because it has become so influential that you already have absorbed a lot of the ideas in the book. You certainly live in a world that is slightly shaped by them. As a teacher, Norman constantly taught through anecdotes about the way things work. ATMs used to give you money and then after they gave you money they would return your card. The model for the bank was take card, do transaction, return card. The problem was people kept leaving their cards in the machine. Donald Norman pointed out that the "mental model" for people was go to atm-> get money. Once the last step is accomplished the customer doesn't thinks they are done. They don't want to keep thinking about the ATM. "Mental Model" of an interface is a term you may have heard and he coined. Now every time I go to an ATM and it gives me my card back before the money, I think of him.