The Design of Everyday Things

I finished recently The Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman, 2013, 368 pages). This is a justifiable classic book that is insightful to virtually anyone.

What is most relevant here is the human perspective. The way we learn things, and even the very limitations of the human brain are central to designing stuff that fits into our daily lives.

As the author points out in different occasions, there are multiple products developed along the years that were sometimes marvelous in themselves, but which were not successful. The reason being that they did not help humans solve real (or perceived) problems in way that could be easily understood and used.

I appreciate a lot the fact that Don Norman has also worked on the industry for many years, including many years at Apple, and therefore he also has first-hand experience of the limitations professionals and companies face when coming up with new products. Budget and time are never enough. And the shortcomings are almost always noticeable.

However, there is a way to make great products, and that is by not ignoring human psychology and by really spending time with potential users to understand what they do, rather than what they (us) may say they (we) do.

This ties back many good recent books and practices on human-centric design, and design thinking. For example, we humans have severe limitations on our short-term memory. We need “signifiers” to point out on real-world objects what they can do, especially when it is not dead obvious. We count on our previous learning and intuition. Which, once in opposition to what a new product expects from us, no matter how nice and cool it may look, will result in usability problems. Sometimes in serious accidents.

One recurrent topic on the book, by the way, is that most accidents are not “human-errors”, even if sometimes the “experts” conclude so. When we dive deeper, there is typically one or more design flaws in products, processes, machines, plants, that are at the root cause of the failures. Sometimes catastrophic ones.

If all this sounds interesting, this book won’t disappoint you. And it should definitely be on the list for those of us designing any kind of product or services to be used by fellow humans.