Book review: Donald Norman “Design of everyday things”

The book was written in 1988 and it aimed to change the way how everyday objects are designed and how they should be more easier to use. It really seems like only people who actually read the book were the everyday users and none of the actual designers, because all that time, 25 years, has passed and nothing has changed.

The book examples quickly reminded me of my own problems, when it once took 7 IT-guys to change a car light and 3 people just to turn on the microwave. The situation is even getting worse, everyday objects are designed so badly that they are sometimes even completely not usable at all, in fact we even avoid some everyday objects so we wouldn`t have to use them every day. The author mentioned some good examples of bad design which made the purpose of the book clearly understandable from the beginning.

The author suggested that designers should think a bit more before designing. That they should think more about how to make the object easily usable and make it look good. I totally agree to that, but as graphic designer myself, I know that many authors are often afraid that a bad design wont`t be used by anyone, even if it is super logical. It`s all about being the first out there. Some even ignore testing and feedback and they think it is better to get the users and give them a hard time figuring out the website, rather then having no users at all.

While I agree that aesthetics and usability should both be considered very hard when designing a product I think even a bigger mistake is that businesses don`t learn from mistakes of others. If a product was hard to use 25 years ago then it probably still is hard to use. A few dare to innovate and change, when it is much easier to go play safe and launch a product that is similar to all the others. As as doctorate of Psychology the author of the book knows very well that people make mistakes and he encourages to learn from that by user feedback. He also claims that large warning or instructions are signs of failure, but this is where I would disagree. I believe that there are people who`s intelligence isn`t that high and when they don`t see a big sign that says "DONT TOUCH" they most probably will, even if the design suggests they shouldn`t.

One might say that the book was too critical in some points or mentioning too many exact names or products like Apple. I personally think all the critique was justified and the examples were the strong points of the book. As a reader people don`t want to hear overall texts but concrete examples and finger pointing.

In my mind it seems the word "design" is loosing, has lost or has never had a meaning for some of the product designers or Forces That Work Against Evolutionary Design who are up just for the money. The book will clearly influence and wake up any people who have read it, making them understand that products should help people not make their life harder. If people or companies keep making things just because they look nice and don`t actually think about usability and people still buy them, then I agree to the author, we should also be blamed just as much. If no one would buy these products then maybe finally someone would understand that things need to change, otherwise they will keep producing even more complicated things.

State transition diagrams, Petri nets

Interface efficiency, KLM, GOMS

The Human Processor Model, Fitts’ Law

Feedback, Errors, Forcing, Gestalt laws, Responsiveness

My own examples

• Capture errors: I play a lot of basketball, so sometimes while playing football I accidentally try to save the ball from going out of the boundaries by stopping it with hands.
• Description errors: Usually typing emails in Estonian when I have to reply in english
• Data-driven errors: Have started to type an sms, then started to think of other things and accidentally wrote something I actually didn`t mean to write
• Associative activation errors: At the car inspection I wanted to ask should I turn off the engine and instead I asked should I switch my car off
• Loss-of-activation errors: sometimes I open the internet browser and the I forgot what I wanted to check from the internet anyway. It usually comes into my mind right after closing the browser.
• Premature conclusion errors: I often forget to safely remove the memory card after downloading images from my camera. I pull it straight out, but that usually results in errors the next time I insert the card or the pictures just go missing.
• Mode errors: When trying to shoot photos with my camera I try to look through the lens, but it`s completely black because I forgot the camera to live mode, which means the picture is on the LCD screen.

7 stages of action

The most hardest part was how to connect user - object - design to the the gulf of execution and the gulf of evaluation. Finally decided to also add intention between those elements and then it became a little easier.