That's such a godawful book. In my view it epitomizes everything that is wrong with design today. And the worst part is that comments like these make it come of

That's such a godawful book. In my view it epitomizes everything that is wrong with design today. And the worst part is that comments like these make it come off as the go-to reference to actually solving these problems. The reasons it's the worst design guidance out there is that it teaches: 1) that engineers should NOT be entrusted/involved with user design. 2) to conceptualize users as blissful idiots. 3) that obscuring errors in a system is actually a good thing. All of these are things that I see the lasting effects of in products I use in every day. Don't get me wrong, I bought this with the best of intentions. It was the highest rated design book on Amazon on the topic. Reading through was an extremely painful exercise in essentially coming to realize that everything I see broken in the engineering teams I work with and products I use is actually codified in words. Take this excerpt as an example -- p. 65: "Eliminate all error messages from electronic and computer systems. Instead, provide help and insight." Are you f'ing kidding me? You cannot seriously think this is right. For the longest of time I wondered why I hated using Apple products. It turns out Norman was schooled at Apple and they absolutely practice this teaching. I bought an early-day iPod touch circa 2007 and proceeded on to loading all my music on it. A few upgrades later, some albums disappeared without any error. I searched and searched and searched, trying to describe my problem in a number of different ways on Google to see what I could find. And all I could find were semi-answers. But you know what? If it had actually displayed "error 0xFHJAD1234" when failing during the upgrade, I could've actually google that. And I'll spare you the story of what I had to do when the family Mac's HDD failed ... So this is what we actually get, devices that SILENTLY fail, designed for people who are assumed not to know what they're doing and who likely do NOT have any technically-literate person around them that could assist them if they could in fact identify the problem. Worse, this philosophy probably hints at a level of intellectual ignorance/arrogance that is quite fascinating. You see, in my line of work I have to be able to walk engineers I work with from the gate-level silicon all the way up to cloud and AI. Without any false modesty, I think I have a fairly good idea of how modern computer architecture works. Yet, I will be the first to tell you that I have no idea how any of these systems work in full. In fact, no one does. Not the best of kernel developers nor the best of chip designers. To claim that you can somehow inventory every possible problem in a computerized system and then provide a graceful exit from that or useful info is either ignorant or arrogant or both. But since you've eliminated engineers from the design loop (see #1 above), no one will tell you you're full of it. So yeah, no. Do read Norman's book. But look at it as everything you should NOT be doing.