13 ms·

The Design of Everyday Things – Book Summary and Notes

289 points by elvis10ten 4y ago

micheljansen 4y ago
Warning: this book leaves some permanent imprints in your mind that will forever cause you to be annoyed at badly designed doors and other things.
- rwmj 4y ago
  It's a constant frustration when I go into someone's kitchen that they obviously spent thousands on, and I see a hob with up/down buttons, or a stylish but absurdly unusable sink faucet.
  - wdb 4y ago
    I have a house here in London where in the kitchen the cold tap is on the left side and hot on the right side while in the bath rooms it is hot water on the right side and hot on the left side of the mixer tap. Seriously I have no idea why the developer thought this was a good idea. At least once a week I get surprised by the hot water when washing my hands :)
    - slowhand09 4y ago
      This was likely a screw up by the plumber when connecting the fixture. Likely not hard to correct.
  - soco 4y ago
    Faucets? You said FAUCETS? As a hotel hopper (in recess) I should have run a blog of crazy shower faucet designs, and I definitely wouldn't have run out of puzzling examples and nasty (cold or hot) surprises.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      I swear every single hotel in the world is in a competition to make the most complicated, impossible to understand faucet. I'm sure if you understand how it works it somehow is more convenient (saves your temperature setting, perhaps) but it often takes me a few minutes to figure out how to get it to work. One even had a "button" that you had to press to "unlock" the dial so you could turn it on, that one almost required a call to the desk.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        In one hotel, I was stuck with cool showers, which were doable but rather unpleasant. On the last day, I discovered that the temp knob could be depressed which enabled it to be turned to hot. Ahh, finally, a hot shower!
- lazybreather 4y ago
  Absolutely not. Atleast not with everything all the time. I love how the front camera on my phone is not concentric to the notch. How my table has uneven legs (I place a wooden piece to adjust). How the edge of my door is not aligned with the frame. How some of my t-shirts have slightly uneven sleeves. For me, imperfections make them personal. I am repelled by people ('designers' ;)) looking at everything to find faults and point them out with pride. Tells me they never made a thing with bare hands all their life.
  - seandoe 4y ago
    There's a difference between personal/hand-made/imperfect and awkward/inefficient/poor design.
  - borroka 4y ago
    You are taking the irregularities of t-shirt sleeves in the same way that one interprets the imperfections that result from the hand-making of bespoke clothing, for example, the seams of tailored suits. The latter is craftsmanship; the former is inferior mass production. Not the same.
    - lazybreather 4y ago
      How they are made is not something I really want to get into. It was more about how some of us look at fault in everything and call it design thinking. I understand that it is frustrating when a product is an outright abomination in terms of design. But not everything needs to be 'designed' to the T. Be it mass production or craftsmanship. Not to mention, there is always added cost involved in the superior 'design' that people talk about.
  - solarmist 4y ago
    As people have commented defects aren’t desirable, but what I think your feelings are leading you toward is Wabi-sabi (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi). There is no such thing as perfection and if there was it’s undesirable. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
- garrickvanburen 4y ago
  This and How Buildings Learn.
- arkitaip 4y ago
  The book makes you question the sanity of a world that even gets the design of doors wrong.
  - NKosmatos 4y ago
    A "Norman door" is a poorly designed door that confuses or fails to give you an idea whether to push, pull or slide. https://99percentinvisible.org/article/norman-doors-dont-know-whether-push-pull-blame-design/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/norman-doors-dont-kno...
    - nibbleshifter 4y ago
      A couple of years ago at a very nice wine bar in Berlin I accidentally pulled a sliding door completely off its tracks due to it being impossible to work out how it was meant to open - it had a handle that I assumed you pulled on. Luckily, I wasn't the first (or probably last) person to make that error.
    - shard 4y ago
      Does that concept have a name now? That reminds me of this Japanese comedy sketch about doors: https://youtu.be/nq-2USGVoEE https://youtu.be/nq-2USGVoEE
      - the_af 4y ago
        The name of the concept is based on the name of the author of "The Design of Everyday Things", Don Norman. This kind of door is what spurred him to write the book, or so it's argued!
- test1235 4y ago
  definitely: handles on push doors
- bob1029 4y ago
  > badly designed doors The lesson I took away is to delete the door if you can figure out how to get the customer to agree.
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  Yes. It does :) But it also leaves you with a sense of why such things happen. Having such understanding helps to counter those "nefarious forces" when you're part of a product design effort.
- tapanjk 4y ago
  True that. I deal with this by applying the Robustness principle [1] where possible: "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others." In other words, be forgiving of bad design while setting a high standard for what I do. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
  - klysm 4y ago
    I'm not sure this is the intent of the robustness principle. I think being 'robust' against bad design would have more to do with the design itself - not your opinion of the designer.
bern4444 4y ago
I am always amazed at how poorly designed bathroom sink faucets are. The spout where the water comes out is always so close to the far edge instead of to the middle of the sink. Placing the spout so the water exits in the middle of the sink would be so much nicer. You wouldn't have to lean over, your hands wouldn't be hitting the back of the sink, and you'd have so much more room to wash your hands.
- daniel_reetz 4y ago
  Consider that this might block uses where another object (or a baby or body part) goes in the sink.
  - nevir 4y ago
    Sinks are such a great example of what seems like a device with deceptively simple requirements for its design – but turns out to have so much complexity.
    - corrral 4y ago
      I've seen some kinda "high design" sinks that do abandon all use cases aside from washing one's hands and teeth-brushing and such—so-shallow-it's-barely-there basin, fancy faucet that sends the water straight out in an arc instead of down, that kind of thing. I assume, like having lots of mirrored or glass furniture/surfaces, they're the kind of thing you get when all the cleaning (and much of the childcare) is done by "the help", who will just have to deal with whatever unhelpful-to-them design decisions you've made. And when you're in a house that has a dozen or more total sinks, so you've also got a "mud sink" somewhere that's better for utility-type things—and maybe one for each floor, if it's the kind of house that has a utility/laundry room on every floor. Not so viable in normal houses where every sink needs to be a multi-tasker.
- ChadNauseam 4y ago
  I'm not sure it's a good idea, but I've always wondered why we don't have more sink fountains. A stream of water that shoots up into the air and falls into the middle of the sink (ideally, going directly down the hole in the middle). That would make it so the faucet never blocks you from putting something big in the sink, and it would be aesthetically very nice I think.
georgeecollins 4y ago
I took a class with Donald Norman and did a work study internship with him. At the time I had no idea who he was and wasn't particularly interested in the class. I was working in neuroscience lab at the time and I thought that would be my career direction. He was the head of the Cognitive Science department. The most amazing thing was the way he taught. It was almost all stories and anecdotes. He didn't start with the theory he started with a problem or a situation, often a case study. He used the example as a way to explain the theory or the issue at hand. Ultimately you did read a lot of research or theoretical papers but because you started from a real world problem it was never boring. At the time it was just a class that surprised me by being much more interesting than I expected. Ultimately it was about the most useful class I ever took.
- richiezc 4y ago
  +1 I took HCI from him in undergrad and I had now idea who he was. I found the teaching style engaging but didn't give it much thought until 3 years later when I started working on consumer internet products.
WalterBright 4y ago
These kinds of things assume critical importance in the design of an aircraft cockpit. For example, the lever that controls the landing gear has a little tire for the knob. The flap controls have a knob shaped like a flap. All so you know what the control is without needing to look (or the cockpit is filled with smoke). The common theme with all these designs is they are driven by accidents. For some strange reason, humans are pretty bad at creating intuitive designs. It's only usage that makes it clear, and it always seems obvious in hindsight. For example, aviation has standardized phrases for things, to avoid confusion. For decades, the maximum power setting on the engines was "takeoff power". I kid you not. This was fixed after a crash caused by the pilot yelling "take off power" to do a go-round, and the copilot idled the engines. This was in civil aviation. The Air Force had to undergo a crash as well to change "takeoff power". The lead Boeing cockpit designer of the 757 explained to me that every intuitive cockpit feature was paid for in blood.
- yboris 4y ago
  > humans are pretty bad at creating intuitive designs I've always assumed that is because so few people care about design who are in power of affecting design. This is partially because it takes effort to think about a problem, and it's much easier to not care, or assume someone else will fix it.
  - diob 4y ago
    It's more about unknown unknowns.
    - yboris 4y ago
      Before we get to those as an explanation, we need to see less evidence of shit design you can spot instantly without having any experience in the field. If a user can instantly recommend an improvement to the design that most would agree is an improvement, that's evidence of shit design.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
mbishop 4y ago
Attention all designers: That skeuomorphic, non-flat design that you might think is unstylish but in reality is so very usable… this book explains why. In the UI of the 2000’s, the UI is visible, the chrome is visible and it has meaning and utility. Buttons are easily found and pushed because they visibly look like they are extending from the display. That’s an affordance. The window corner used to have a “rough” texture just like exterior stairs have texture strips to keep your feet from slipping. They indicated that the friction from your mouse-pointer on the screen will move the window corner. These designs allowed user decisions about UI function to exist in the subconscious where they weren’t a distraction from the actual problem at hand. The bar these days seems to be “is it possible for the user to eventually accomplish their task?) as opposed to “how can we demand even less of the users’ brain for the task to be accomplished?” I am anticipating this will not be a popular response, but I can’t help but think wrt/ UI design, we’ve collectively thrown out the baby with the bath water for vanity and it’s going to take some criticism to get it back. Reading this book and studying the UI designs it inspired (ex: early to late 2000’s Mac UI) is IMO the best education a young UI-designer can get. Edit: I don’t want to lay too much at the feet of designers because it’s probably Product Managers that also need to read this book and care about it.
smusamashah 4y ago
For me one lesson was that when we fail to properly use a thing we should blame that thing for its bad design instead of ourselves. Another was that obviousness of a feature is how that thing will be used. You don't want people placing stuff on top of walls, don't make them flat.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Yeah that's easily the biggest lesson of the book, especially because almost everyone gets it wrong. It's especially noticeable here, so if you haven't read this book yet please do! The other big lesson I took is about discoverability but I think most people here know about that, even if they don't really notice where it's terrible (Vim, CLIs, Python, etc.)
- atoav 4y ago
  > For me one lesson was that when we fail to properly use a thing we should blame that thing for its bad design instead of ourselves. I think this is a bit too easy. After all it depends on what problem the thing is solving. E.g. if I think of lab test equipment you failing to use it properly might have nothing to do with the design and everything to do with you not having sufficient knowledge in the given domain. I vehemently oppose the idea that everything needs to be usable without instruction. Sure, everything where it makes sense should be usable without instructions — but it does not make sense everywhere. That btw. does not mean the design and usability of the lab test equipment cannot be improved uppon. I think any design can be improved uppon till you at least find a local maxima. But not every design needs to be usable without instruction, because not every tool/object should be usable without instruction. For other objects usability is simply a function of your ability to understand basic physics. If you e.g. hold a flashlight wrong enough you might emit light at an angle that wont properly illuminate the thing you are meant to illuminate. If you hold a microphone 50cm away and point it in the wrong direction and expect your voice to be heared well, you would have done better with instructions.
  - Stratoscope 4y ago
    > If you hold a microphone 50cm away and point it in the wrong direction and expect your voice to be [heard] well, you would have done better with instructions. I used to see this in church settings where someone would come up front to "give a testimony" (share a personal anecdote) and be handed a typical SM58-style vocal mic. They would hold it nearly at arms length pointed straight up, so they were talking off the side of this directional mic. It drove the sound guys and the entire congregation nuts.
zoltrix303 4y ago
I took a UX methodology class a few years back and the teacher kept referring to this author as the father of UX design. I think its a great book to explain intrinsic usability, how a product should feel natural to the user without needing any instructions. One example was designing mall entrance doors where there is a lot of human traffic, having an arrow or no arrow showing the direction, should you write exit ? Etc. I very much liked the book.
michelb 4y ago
Invaluable book for designers and developers everywhere. It's amazing how you run into poorly designed things on a daily basis.
NKosmatos 4y ago
For additional reading related to UI/UX, usability testing, service blueprints, usable web pages and all sorts of related topics, head over to the Nielsen Norman Group webpage (https://www.nngroup.com https://www.nngroup.com). Yes, that's Don Norman who wrote the book referenced by the OP and also Jakob Nielsen (a.k.a. the king of usability) :-)
wodenokoto 4y ago
This is definitely one of the books that has shaped my thinking the most. The book argues very strongly for functional design and design that makes usage obvious. “The way you use a thing should be encoded in the way the thing is, not in a manual”. I’ve been told there’s a follow up that concedes some of this and argues for emotional design. Something a long the lines of “this thing doesn’t need this handle, but it makes the thing feel manageable and less intimidating”. My biggest eye opener, though, was the idea of designing for display in the store versus usage at home. An updated example for me is the iPhone. It has premium materials that are assembled with tiny tolerances and has a very nice feel in the hand. But once you’ve been impressed by these in the store and you buy it, you slap on a $5 cover and never enjoy the premium materials and physical design. The reasonable thing would be to have the phone shell-less and with interchangeable covers, like an old Nokia phone, but that is not nice in the show room.
- misnome 4y ago
  I wonder how much of that is a user vs designer thing. On the few occasions when I wear suits, I’ve actually removed the cover, because it safely glides in and out of the suit pocket like it was almost designed for it.
  - roboyoshi 4y ago
    That is an interesting observation that I will look out for too now.. Sometimes you need to adapt a "thing" to you.. and the iphone and it's shell are a very simple example of that.
- jrowen 4y ago
  Why hasn't Apple ever made a version with a built-in ruggedized case? I hate putting the case on but in practice it's too fragile of a thing for many people's usage patterns. Seems like one of those things, like the flashlight, where they would see how the people are using it and build it in for a more streamlined experience. I don't want to believe the cynical interpretation that they do it to sell more phones/repairs, but I can't think of another reason.
hyperpallium2 4y ago
"their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws” - DNA
sali0 4y ago
I have heard some great things about this book as far as physical design. Has this book inspired any insights on design of software or other engineering related topics?
- capableweb 4y ago
  While the book focuses on physical design, most of the content applies equally when it comes to digital computer interfaces. A heavier focus on affordances, signifiers, mapping (and all the other concepts introduced by Norman) by proclaimed UX experts would make most web UIs so much more usable. Norman has also been involved in the whole UX movement for interfaces since... well, the beginning, since he was the first person who even had "User Experience" in their job title (when he started working at Apple).
- MattPalmer1086 4y ago
  I'm not sure how directly, but the old User interface Hall of Shame lists it in its recommended reading section... http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/shame.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/shame.htm
- JusticeJuice 4y ago
  Checkout the research published by nngroup, that's very software focused. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/
roboyoshi 4y ago
I can also assure everyone that this book is worth reading. Thanks to OP for doing what I wanted to do in a 2nd reading: Make notes. But the most important bits still stayed with me even without writing notes. So just enjoy reading it. You will see the world differently. It will annoy you a bit. But at least now I now why my desk is always cluttered. I choose products more wisely and put more thoughts into designing things. There is always something hidden and this books helps a lot in getting a start in that direction.
kriro 4y ago
Well the reality of industrial designers is quite interesting. I have a good friend who is doing this (his own small studio) and as someone with a software background the processes are mind boggling. The politics involved are amazing. Weeks of debating color choices. Back and forth between departments (including the realization at a couple of month in that production costs would be through the roof...something mentioned on slidset 1, week 1) etc. etc. It was also eye opening for my naive world view that awards are simply bought. A red dot award is basically pay sum x and you are guaranteed to "win".
- rwmj 4y ago
  I used to work for a mortgage broker, and there was a "Best Mortgage Broker of 200x Award" that basically rotated each year around the participating companies.
  - AnotherGoodName 4y ago
    There is a limit to how low you can put the bar to these paid awards though. There used to be a heart foundation tick on every second item of food in Australia. It was a paid award with a low bar. The award died when they started putting the tick on boxes of McDonald's chicken nuggets. Everyone immediately caught on that it was bullshit after that and the tick was seen as a laughing stock. The tick is no longer a thing at all since no one wanted their products to be seen in the same category as a McNugget. https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2015-12-11/heart-tick-retires-what-worked-what-didnt/7020732 https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2015-12-11/heart-tick-ret...
  - VieEnCode 4y ago
    I strongly suspect that many awards in the legal industry work in this way also.
    - daniel_reetz 4y ago
      In the AV industry this is the norm at conferences and conventions.
    - 4y ago
throwaway81523 4y ago
Review is recent but this is about Don Norman's book from the 1980's, if anyone was expecting something new. IMHO the book was ok but it didn't wow me or anything like that, had a fair amount of stuff that I subjectively felt was wrong (matter of opinion), and a smaller amount of stuff that I thought was objectively wrong (he said X off the top of his head, but published studies said otherwise). I haven't read the review yet. Will try to do so tomorrow.
meerita 4y ago
This was my first design book. It was mindblowing. It teached me the concept of design mapping, that helped me greatly.
baxuz 4y ago
I love this book. And the concept of affordances and signifiers.
vstrava 4y ago
This is the UX design bible. Like most holy books, it's gone unread, and UX designers will fall back on simpler things, like design kits and ignoring the user
jaclaz 4y ago
Fun fact, for some reasons it had the title translated in Italian as "La caffettiera del masochista" (The masochist's coffee pot) which is a great textual description of the cover image, moving "the psychology of everyday things" to a sub-title. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6SC0QO0kVZI/YAyILg6A43I/AAAAAAAAVaI/dvyKQtCJw1caGq5y0SjOMxU5VUyFRpSNgCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG-3213.jpg https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6SC0QO0kVZI/YAyILg6A43I/AAAAAAAAV...
- cinntaile 4y ago
  The English edition I have has the coffee pot described as a masochist's coffee pot, so I would assume it's the actual title of the artwork.
  - jaclaz 4y ago
    Sure, it is one of the works by the French artist Jacques Carelman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Carelman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Carelman To be picky the original title of the artwork is "coffe pot for masochists" as it was part of a (mock) "Catalogue of impossible things" https://www.arretsurimages.net/articles/carelman-lintrouvable?id=13532 https://www.arretsurimages.net/articles/carelman-lintrouvabl...
- gattilorenz 4y ago
  Additional fun fact: the Italian subtitle is not "the psychology of everyday things" (which in itself is different from the original, since that one mentions "design") but "the psychopathology of everyday things", which is a reference to Freud's "the psychopatology of everyday life"
  - jonah 4y ago
    Actually, the original title was "the psychology of everyday things", but he changed it to "design" in subsequent editions/printings because he felt it was clearer more to the point.[1] [1] The book was originally published in 1988 with the title The Psychology of Everyday Things. Norman said his academic peers liked that title, but believed the new title better conveyed the content of the book and better attracted interested readers. It is often referred to by the initialisms POET and DOET. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
> Good design is harder to notice than poor design, partly because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. This is my goal. UX that gets out of the way. People shouldn't stop to admire the light switch. They should just flick it.

289 points by elvis10ten 4y ago

Warning: this book leaves some permanent imprints in your mind that will forever cause you to be annoyed at badly designed doors and other things.

rwmj 4y ago
It's a constant frustration when I go into someone's kitchen that they obviously spent thousands on, and I see a hob with up/down buttons, or a stylish but absurdly unusable sink faucet.
- wdb 4y ago
  I have a house here in London where in the kitchen the cold tap is on the left side and hot on the right side while in the bath rooms it is hot water on the right side and hot on the left side of the mixer tap. Seriously I have no idea why the developer thought this was a good idea. At least once a week I get surprised by the hot water when washing my hands :)
  - slowhand09 4y ago
    This was likely a screw up by the plumber when connecting the fixture. Likely not hard to correct.
- soco 4y ago
  Faucets? You said FAUCETS? As a hotel hopper (in recess) I should have run a blog of crazy shower faucet designs, and I definitely wouldn't have run out of puzzling examples and nasty (cold or hot) surprises.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I swear every single hotel in the world is in a competition to make the most complicated, impossible to understand faucet. I'm sure if you understand how it works it somehow is more convenient (saves your temperature setting, perhaps) but it often takes me a few minutes to figure out how to get it to work. One even had a "button" that you had to press to "unlock" the dial so you could turn it on, that one almost required a call to the desk.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      In one hotel, I was stuck with cool showers, which were doable but rather unpleasant. On the last day, I discovered that the temp knob could be depressed which enabled it to be turned to hot. Ahh, finally, a hot shower!
lazybreather 4y ago
Absolutely not. Atleast not with everything all the time. I love how the front camera on my phone is not concentric to the notch. How my table has uneven legs (I place a wooden piece to adjust). How the edge of my door is not aligned with the frame. How some of my t-shirts have slightly uneven sleeves. For me, imperfections make them personal. I am repelled by people ('designers' ;)) looking at everything to find faults and point them out with pride. Tells me they never made a thing with bare hands all their life.
- seandoe 4y ago
  There's a difference between personal/hand-made/imperfect and awkward/inefficient/poor design.
- borroka 4y ago
  You are taking the irregularities of t-shirt sleeves in the same way that one interprets the imperfections that result from the hand-making of bespoke clothing, for example, the seams of tailored suits. The latter is craftsmanship; the former is inferior mass production. Not the same.
  - lazybreather 4y ago
    How they are made is not something I really want to get into. It was more about how some of us look at fault in everything and call it design thinking. I understand that it is frustrating when a product is an outright abomination in terms of design. But not everything needs to be 'designed' to the T. Be it mass production or craftsmanship. Not to mention, there is always added cost involved in the superior 'design' that people talk about.
- solarmist 4y ago
  As people have commented defects aren’t desirable, but what I think your feelings are leading you toward is Wabi-sabi (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi). There is no such thing as perfection and if there was it’s undesirable. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
garrickvanburen 4y ago
This and How Buildings Learn.
arkitaip 4y ago
The book makes you question the sanity of a world that even gets the design of doors wrong.
- NKosmatos 4y ago
  A "Norman door" is a poorly designed door that confuses or fails to give you an idea whether to push, pull or slide. https://99percentinvisible.org/article/norman-doors-dont-know-whether-push-pull-blame-design/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/norman-doors-dont-kno...
  - nibbleshifter 4y ago
    A couple of years ago at a very nice wine bar in Berlin I accidentally pulled a sliding door completely off its tracks due to it being impossible to work out how it was meant to open - it had a handle that I assumed you pulled on. Luckily, I wasn't the first (or probably last) person to make that error.
  - shard 4y ago
    Does that concept have a name now? That reminds me of this Japanese comedy sketch about doors: https://youtu.be/nq-2USGVoEE https://youtu.be/nq-2USGVoEE
    - the_af 4y ago
      The name of the concept is based on the name of the author of "The Design of Everyday Things", Don Norman. This kind of door is what spurred him to write the book, or so it's argued!
test1235 4y ago
definitely: handles on push doors
bob1029 4y ago
> badly designed doors The lesson I took away is to delete the door if you can figure out how to get the customer to agree.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
Yes. It does :) But it also leaves you with a sense of why such things happen. Having such understanding helps to counter those "nefarious forces" when you're part of a product design effort.
tapanjk 4y ago
True that. I deal with this by applying the Robustness principle [1] where possible: "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others." In other words, be forgiving of bad design while setting a high standard for what I do. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
- klysm 4y ago
  I'm not sure this is the intent of the robustness principle. I think being 'robust' against bad design would have more to do with the design itself - not your opinion of the designer.

bern4444 4y ago

I am always amazed at how poorly designed bathroom sink faucets are. The spout where the water comes out is always so close to the far edge instead of to the middle of the sink. Placing the spout so the water exits in the middle of the sink would be so much nicer. You wouldn't have to lean over, your hands wouldn't be hitting the back of the sink, and you'd have so much more room to wash your hands.

daniel_reetz 4y ago
Consider that this might block uses where another object (or a baby or body part) goes in the sink.
- nevir 4y ago
  Sinks are such a great example of what seems like a device with deceptively simple requirements for its design – but turns out to have so much complexity.
  - corrral 4y ago
    I've seen some kinda "high design" sinks that do abandon all use cases aside from washing one's hands and teeth-brushing and such—so-shallow-it's-barely-there basin, fancy faucet that sends the water straight out in an arc instead of down, that kind of thing. I assume, like having lots of mirrored or glass furniture/surfaces, they're the kind of thing you get when all the cleaning (and much of the childcare) is done by "the help", who will just have to deal with whatever unhelpful-to-them design decisions you've made. And when you're in a house that has a dozen or more total sinks, so you've also got a "mud sink" somewhere that's better for utility-type things—and maybe one for each floor, if it's the kind of house that has a utility/laundry room on every floor. Not so viable in normal houses where every sink needs to be a multi-tasker.
ChadNauseam 4y ago
I'm not sure it's a good idea, but I've always wondered why we don't have more sink fountains. A stream of water that shoots up into the air and falls into the middle of the sink (ideally, going directly down the hole in the middle). That would make it so the faucet never blocks you from putting something big in the sink, and it would be aesthetically very nice I think.

georgeecollins 4y ago

I took a class with Donald Norman and did a work study internship with him. At the time I had no idea who he was and wasn't particularly interested in the class. I was working in neuroscience lab at the time and I thought that would be my career direction. He was the head of the Cognitive Science department. The most amazing thing was the way he taught. It was almost all stories and anecdotes. He didn't start with the theory he started with a problem or a situation, often a case study. He used the example as a way to explain the theory or the issue at hand. Ultimately you did read a lot of research or theoretical papers but because you started from a real world problem it was never boring. At the time it was just a class that surprised me by being much more interesting than I expected. Ultimately it was about the most useful class I ever took.

richiezc 4y ago
+1 I took HCI from him in undergrad and I had now idea who he was. I found the teaching style engaging but didn't give it much thought until 3 years later when I started working on consumer internet products.

WalterBright 4y ago

These kinds of things assume critical importance in the design of an aircraft cockpit. For example, the lever that controls the landing gear has a little tire for the knob. The flap controls have a knob shaped like a flap. All so you know what the control is without needing to look (or the cockpit is filled with smoke). The common theme with all these designs is they are driven by accidents. For some strange reason, humans are pretty bad at creating intuitive designs. It's only usage that makes it clear, and it always seems obvious in hindsight. For example, aviation has standardized phrases for things, to avoid confusion. For decades, the maximum power setting on the engines was "takeoff power". I kid you not. This was fixed after a crash caused by the pilot yelling "take off power" to do a go-round, and the copilot idled the engines. This was in civil aviation. The Air Force had to undergo a crash as well to change "takeoff power". The lead Boeing cockpit designer of the 757 explained to me that every intuitive cockpit feature was paid for in blood.

yboris 4y ago
> humans are pretty bad at creating intuitive designs I've always assumed that is because so few people care about design who are in power of affecting design. This is partially because it takes effort to think about a problem, and it's much easier to not care, or assume someone else will fix it.
- diob 4y ago
  It's more about unknown unknowns.
  - yboris 4y ago
    Before we get to those as an explanation, we need to see less evidence of shit design you can spot instantly without having any experience in the field. If a user can instantly recommend an improvement to the design that most would agree is an improvement, that's evidence of shit design.
    - WalterBright 4y ago

mbishop 4y ago

Attention all designers: That skeuomorphic, non-flat design that you might think is unstylish but in reality is so very usable… this book explains why. In the UI of the 2000’s, the UI is visible, the chrome is visible and it has meaning and utility. Buttons are easily found and pushed because they visibly look like they are extending from the display. That’s an affordance. The window corner used to have a “rough” texture just like exterior stairs have texture strips to keep your feet from slipping. They indicated that the friction from your mouse-pointer on the screen will move the window corner. These designs allowed user decisions about UI function to exist in the subconscious where they weren’t a distraction from the actual problem at hand. The bar these days seems to be “is it possible for the user to eventually accomplish their task?) as opposed to “how can we demand even less of the users’ brain for the task to be accomplished?” I am anticipating this will not be a popular response, but I can’t help but think wrt/ UI design, we’ve collectively thrown out the baby with the bath water for vanity and it’s going to take some criticism to get it back. Reading this book and studying the UI designs it inspired (ex: early to late 2000’s Mac UI) is IMO the best education a young UI-designer can get. Edit: I don’t want to lay too much at the feet of designers because it’s probably Product Managers that also need to read this book and care about it.

smusamashah 4y ago

For me one lesson was that when we fail to properly use a thing we should blame that thing for its bad design instead of ourselves. Another was that obviousness of a feature is how that thing will be used. You don't want people placing stuff on top of walls, don't make them flat.

IshKebab 4y ago
Yeah that's easily the biggest lesson of the book, especially because almost everyone gets it wrong. It's especially noticeable here, so if you haven't read this book yet please do! The other big lesson I took is about discoverability but I think most people here know about that, even if they don't really notice where it's terrible (Vim, CLIs, Python, etc.)
atoav 4y ago
> For me one lesson was that when we fail to properly use a thing we should blame that thing for its bad design instead of ourselves. I think this is a bit too easy. After all it depends on what problem the thing is solving. E.g. if I think of lab test equipment you failing to use it properly might have nothing to do with the design and everything to do with you not having sufficient knowledge in the given domain. I vehemently oppose the idea that everything needs to be usable without instruction. Sure, everything where it makes sense should be usable without instructions — but it does not make sense everywhere. That btw. does not mean the design and usability of the lab test equipment cannot be improved uppon. I think any design can be improved uppon till you at least find a local maxima. But not every design needs to be usable without instruction, because not every tool/object should be usable without instruction. For other objects usability is simply a function of your ability to understand basic physics. If you e.g. hold a flashlight wrong enough you might emit light at an angle that wont properly illuminate the thing you are meant to illuminate. If you hold a microphone 50cm away and point it in the wrong direction and expect your voice to be heared well, you would have done better with instructions.
- Stratoscope 4y ago
  > If you hold a microphone 50cm away and point it in the wrong direction and expect your voice to be [heard] well, you would have done better with instructions. I used to see this in church settings where someone would come up front to "give a testimony" (share a personal anecdote) and be handed a typical SM58-style vocal mic. They would hold it nearly at arms length pointed straight up, so they were talking off the side of this directional mic. It drove the sound guys and the entire congregation nuts.

zoltrix303 4y ago

I took a UX methodology class a few years back and the teacher kept referring to this author as the father of UX design. I think its a great book to explain intrinsic usability, how a product should feel natural to the user without needing any instructions. One example was designing mall entrance doors where there is a lot of human traffic, having an arrow or no arrow showing the direction, should you write exit ? Etc. I very much liked the book.

michelb 4y ago

Invaluable book for designers and developers everywhere. It's amazing how you run into poorly designed things on a daily basis.

NKosmatos 4y ago

For additional reading related to UI/UX, usability testing, service blueprints, usable web pages and all sorts of related topics, head over to the Nielsen Norman Group webpage (https://www.nngroup.com https://www.nngroup.com). Yes, that's Don Norman who wrote the book referenced by the OP and also Jakob Nielsen (a.k.a. the king of usability) :-)

wodenokoto 4y ago

This is definitely one of the books that has shaped my thinking the most. The book argues very strongly for functional design and design that makes usage obvious. “The way you use a thing should be encoded in the way the thing is, not in a manual”. I’ve been told there’s a follow up that concedes some of this and argues for emotional design. Something a long the lines of “this thing doesn’t need this handle, but it makes the thing feel manageable and less intimidating”. My biggest eye opener, though, was the idea of designing for display in the store versus usage at home. An updated example for me is the iPhone. It has premium materials that are assembled with tiny tolerances and has a very nice feel in the hand. But once you’ve been impressed by these in the store and you buy it, you slap on a $5 cover and never enjoy the premium materials and physical design. The reasonable thing would be to have the phone shell-less and with interchangeable covers, like an old Nokia phone, but that is not nice in the show room.

misnome 4y ago
I wonder how much of that is a user vs designer thing. On the few occasions when I wear suits, I’ve actually removed the cover, because it safely glides in and out of the suit pocket like it was almost designed for it.
- roboyoshi 4y ago
  That is an interesting observation that I will look out for too now.. Sometimes you need to adapt a "thing" to you.. and the iphone and it's shell are a very simple example of that.
jrowen 4y ago
Why hasn't Apple ever made a version with a built-in ruggedized case? I hate putting the case on but in practice it's too fragile of a thing for many people's usage patterns. Seems like one of those things, like the flashlight, where they would see how the people are using it and build it in for a more streamlined experience. I don't want to believe the cynical interpretation that they do it to sell more phones/repairs, but I can't think of another reason.

hyperpallium2 4y ago

"their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws” - DNA

sali0 4y ago

I have heard some great things about this book as far as physical design. Has this book inspired any insights on design of software or other engineering related topics?

capableweb 4y ago
While the book focuses on physical design, most of the content applies equally when it comes to digital computer interfaces. A heavier focus on affordances, signifiers, mapping (and all the other concepts introduced by Norman) by proclaimed UX experts would make most web UIs so much more usable. Norman has also been involved in the whole UX movement for interfaces since... well, the beginning, since he was the first person who even had "User Experience" in their job title (when he started working at Apple).
MattPalmer1086 4y ago
I'm not sure how directly, but the old User interface Hall of Shame lists it in its recommended reading section... http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/shame.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/shame.htm
JusticeJuice 4y ago
Checkout the research published by nngroup, that's very software focused. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/

roboyoshi 4y ago

I can also assure everyone that this book is worth reading. Thanks to OP for doing what I wanted to do in a 2nd reading: Make notes. But the most important bits still stayed with me even without writing notes. So just enjoy reading it. You will see the world differently. It will annoy you a bit. But at least now I now why my desk is always cluttered. I choose products more wisely and put more thoughts into designing things. There is always something hidden and this books helps a lot in getting a start in that direction.

kriro 4y ago

Well the reality of industrial designers is quite interesting. I have a good friend who is doing this (his own small studio) and as someone with a software background the processes are mind boggling. The politics involved are amazing. Weeks of debating color choices. Back and forth between departments (including the realization at a couple of month in that production costs would be through the roof...something mentioned on slidset 1, week 1) etc. etc. It was also eye opening for my naive world view that awards are simply bought. A red dot award is basically pay sum x and you are guaranteed to "win".

rwmj 4y ago
I used to work for a mortgage broker, and there was a "Best Mortgage Broker of 200x Award" that basically rotated each year around the participating companies.
- AnotherGoodName 4y ago
  There is a limit to how low you can put the bar to these paid awards though. There used to be a heart foundation tick on every second item of food in Australia. It was a paid award with a low bar. The award died when they started putting the tick on boxes of McDonald's chicken nuggets. Everyone immediately caught on that it was bullshit after that and the tick was seen as a laughing stock. The tick is no longer a thing at all since no one wanted their products to be seen in the same category as a McNugget. https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2015-12-11/heart-tick-retires-what-worked-what-didnt/7020732 https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2015-12-11/heart-tick-ret...
- VieEnCode 4y ago
  I strongly suspect that many awards in the legal industry work in this way also.
  - daniel_reetz 4y ago
    In the AV industry this is the norm at conferences and conventions.
  - 4y ago

throwaway81523 4y ago

Review is recent but this is about Don Norman's book from the 1980's, if anyone was expecting something new. IMHO the book was ok but it didn't wow me or anything like that, had a fair amount of stuff that I subjectively felt was wrong (matter of opinion), and a smaller amount of stuff that I thought was objectively wrong (he said X off the top of his head, but published studies said otherwise). I haven't read the review yet. Will try to do so tomorrow.

meerita 4y ago

This was my first design book. It was mindblowing. It teached me the concept of design mapping, that helped me greatly.

baxuz 4y ago

I love this book. And the concept of affordances and signifiers.

vstrava 4y ago

This is the UX design bible. Like most holy books, it's gone unread, and UX designers will fall back on simpler things, like design kits and ignoring the user

jaclaz 4y ago

Fun fact, for some reasons it had the title translated in Italian as "La caffettiera del masochista" (The masochist's coffee pot) which is a great textual description of the cover image, moving "the psychology of everyday things" to a sub-title. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6SC0QO0kVZI/YAyILg6A43I/AAAAAAAAVaI/dvyKQtCJw1caGq5y0SjOMxU5VUyFRpSNgCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG-3213.jpg https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6SC0QO0kVZI/YAyILg6A43I/AAAAAAAAV...

cinntaile 4y ago
The English edition I have has the coffee pot described as a masochist's coffee pot, so I would assume it's the actual title of the artwork.
- jaclaz 4y ago
  Sure, it is one of the works by the French artist Jacques Carelman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Carelman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Carelman To be picky the original title of the artwork is "coffe pot for masochists" as it was part of a (mock) "Catalogue of impossible things" https://www.arretsurimages.net/articles/carelman-lintrouvable?id=13532 https://www.arretsurimages.net/articles/carelman-lintrouvabl...
gattilorenz 4y ago
Additional fun fact: the Italian subtitle is not "the psychology of everyday things" (which in itself is different from the original, since that one mentions "design") but "the psychopathology of everyday things", which is a reference to Freud's "the psychopatology of everyday life"
- jonah 4y ago
  Actually, the original title was "the psychology of everyday things", but he changed it to "design" in subsequent editions/printings because he felt it was clearer more to the point.[1] [1] The book was originally published in 1988 with the title The Psychology of Everyday Things. Norman said his academic peers liked that title, but believed the new title better conveyed the content of the book and better attracted interested readers. It is often referred to by the initialisms POET and DOET. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

> Good design is harder to notice than poor design, partly because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. This is my goal. UX that gets out of the way. People shouldn't stop to admire the light switch. They should just flick it.