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.
> 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.
The reason people in power don't care about design is because good design is hard to quantify and thus hard to justify effort and/or expense.
The results of bad design (i.e. takeoff power from grandparent) are much easier to quantify and therefore easier to use to catalyze improvement.
This is why Apple, under Jobs, was so unique. He helped rebuild the company around design despite the fact that their obsession with design cost them loads of money (in the short term). In the longer term, their products' success has spoken for itself but you can bet that past shareholders/board members were constantly asking "do we need this?"
It is about feedback-loops. Even well-funded, top-down design is going to have cognitive gaps. Also it needs to be continuous, usage changes, users/people/customer change, features are added. Other tools in outside environment are adopted, etc ... All these need to be continuously evaluated. tested, and reconsidered. Plenty of people in power acknowledge UX to be important enough to "approve a headcount" but it probably is too limited, narrowly focused, and only focused on new stuff.
It's not because they don't care. They are just inherently bad at it. Look at all the bad designs in programming languages. The designers certainly did care.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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). 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.”
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Yeah I know the book. Yet: your comment made it sound like this idea is universally applicable (which as I demonstrated it isn't).
Knowing which thing is meant to be an everyday thing and which is meant to require some domain specific knowledge is key. Trying to make some specialized tool easier to use than it should be, can harm the usability of the specialized thing. Treating an everyday object as a specialized thing when it is clearly not and pushing the burden of reading the object onto the user is also bad. Both problems can be observed (just think about documentation that starts with "this is completely trivial to use" and then it isn't).
As Dieter Rams said: Good design is honest. That means also that it should not hide the complexity of the actual problem people try to solve with this in a bad way.
> Yeah I know the book. Yet: your comment made it sound like this idea is universally applicable (which as I demonstrated it isn't).
The comment might read so if you don't have the context, but the context here is everyday things, as is obvious by the title (and the book).
The book also talks (which probably you're familiar with already then) about discerning what is a everyday thing vs not.
Dieter Rams is also mentioned in the book if I remember correctly, as examples of good user experience, especially since Rams mostly created designs for everyday things.
Tufte[0] is a good person to demonstrate that kind of UX. His stuff can be pretty crazy, and often needs training, but, once someone knows how to do something he champions, it's amazing.
The example I use, in my life, is Tokyo subway maps[1]. They look crazy complicated; and they are, because it's a complex system.
But after we learn it, using them is as natural as turning a door handle.
I took Tufte's course. London Metro maps is good also. He points out the map is significantly different than reality, but makes the complex seem simple.
I didn't mean 'everything'. Things that do require specialized knowledge are already used by a very specific subset of people.
Its about common everyday things. We have a washing machine which I totally can't use without going through the manual, reading which number and which light does what. You shouldn't need to carefully go through a manual to just wash your clothes.
There is another book "User Interface Design for Programmers" by Joel Spolsky from which my take away was that no one is going to read all your manuals and documents.
Both of these essentially boil down to making things obvious for your end users.
> 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.
The book is not talking about every single thing, but everyday things, objects people without any domain knowledge should be able to use, like radios, teapots, doors and so on.
I feel you are re-emphasizing the validity of the point.
It should not be easy to use things wrongly, with more secret knowledge needed to use things that are more dangerous or require more skill than things that will do no harm when used wrongly.
In other words, your lab equipment should be fool-proofed so that if I walked into the lab and try to use it, I might get it loud buzzing sound a emoji of a sad face.
I am not the first to believe this. "Poka yoke" is a manufacturing term for a reason.
I think a problem with designing specialized equipment (such as lab equipment) in such a way that it is "obvious" to people without specialized knowledge is that it becomes annoying to use for power users, i.e. the lab workers who do have the specialized knowledge.
Think of the command line. It would drive me crazy if it didn't exist, because I'm a power user. But it's not a good interface for a novice, it fails several design guidelines, starting with lack of discoverability.
Lab equipment is even worse, since you -- a non-scientist -- are not even supposed to be touching it to begin with.
I do think that equipment with the potential to cause catastrophic failure (such as a nuclear reactor) should be designed in such a way that the critical error state cannot be entered easily. A silly human mistake shouldn't cause a reactor meltdown. (Do note modern nuclear reactors tend to "fail safe", so this is definitely a consideration!)
I don't think that the command line (take Macs) is difficult to discover, since you have just to digit "terminal" in spotlight. I think it is within easy reach of anyone, then if the word "terminal" doesn't mean anything to the user, there is no point in looking for the command line.
Sorry, I mean using the command line. You can't easily discover which terminal commands are available, which is why the command line has terrible affordances -- in Don Norman's parlance -- for novices.
I didn't mean discovering the terminal app itself!
Back in the day, when VCRs were a thing, everybody used to joke about how no one new how to program theirs. Heck, half of them had the blinking clock forever cause people couldn’t figure out how to reset it.
After reading this book, I realized that maybe if one person can’t program their VCR, you could have argued that it’s their fault. But certainly if so many people have problems with it, it’s clearly an issue with the design.
It can also indicate a process that is (currently) beyond the capabilities of the interface available (thinking the difficulty of programming a VCR when you have four buttons and one LED that can display 88:88 and that's it vs a full touchscreen interface on a phone).
Arguably the VCRs did as well as they could - BUT they made the critical mistake of not realizing that programming and setting the clock would be difficult (and for many uses of the machine, not necessary at all, so nobody would bother figuring it out), and so didn't set the VCR to just not display the clock until the time was set. Very few people bought VCRs to use as a clock, after all.
The clock was crucial to timed recordings, which were how people recorded TV programs when they weren't around for them before things like TIVO existed. Set a it to record when your program's supposed to start and for X duration, put a blank tape in, go to work, come home and find it's recorded that daytime program you didn't want to miss.
If you weren't going to use that feature, yeah, it was pointless and could have just stayed blank rather than blinking 12:00 or whatever.
Interestingly car radios have the same "how do you set the time" problem, and arguably a clock is more useful in a car anyway - but almost all of them set the time to 12:00 when they get power back. They don't blink.
Which means that if you can't figure out how to set the time, you can just remember to disconnect the battery just before noon, and then reconnect it.
The flashing clock on a VCR is actually an error message because if it lost power/lost time, it won't record correctly until you tell it what time it is.
But if you have no timed recording setup, there's no need to report that error.
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.)
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.
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"
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
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".
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.
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.
Surely I'm naive, but I realized just a few years ago that all awards of the kind "best place to work 2022" and such are all paid for, nobody "wins" a real competition. Your workplace pays the ranking company and is advised on how to improve some made up stats and after a while it "wins" an "award" within the small subset of companies that paid for that service.
By "realized this" I really mean "I was shown this reality by the people in charge of paying for the service". I guess I should have know better, but my cynicism failed me in this instance!
How would you even grade such a thing? I can't think of any objective way to grade best place to work. I work where we get free soda - I've been here for 10 years and still haven't used it, so for me this doesn't make it great. I have a sit-stand desk, I'm one of the few people who use the buttons to switch every day, so for me this is great, but for most it is a muh thing. There are ping-pong tables in some offices. There are bike racks and showers in some. to me the best part of going to the office is the people - how do you rate that when what people like in each other is different.
They tend to mention generic things like "great culture", "career plans", "managers who listen", "transparency".
You are absolutely right, it's all fluffy and intangible. I mean, it's all obviously good, and also every company says this about themselves. Whoever heard of a company advertising "toxic culture", "you'll never get a promotion", and "nobody knows anything about the company's health until it's bankrupt"?
The way it works is a questionnaire is created by the rating agency, meant to cover a wide degree of workplace factors. The do tend to cover the ones that have some academic rigor, like questions about autonomy or career growth, beyond the fluffy ones. Weighting of these factors hasn't ever been transparent to me as an employee. And it does seem to be pay-to-play to be considered, but there is an attempt at objectivity. But for your example, if 90% of the employees say they enjoy coming to work everyday, or they would recommend working to in that workplace to a colleague at a different firm, then independent of the factors enabled such opinions, that company did something right, modulo people just giving bullshit answers.
The impossibility to measure such a thing, at least within the modest means of the publication issuing the award, should be the clue telling you something is wrong.
I'm not sure I realized it before hearing about the payments myself though.
Every single industry that exists gives itself awards. Usually one or two are actually legit and prestigious, but there are often dozens (or hundreds) more of decreasing relevance that exist purely for marketing purposes, and many of those are pay to play (usually indirectly though, i.e., buy ad space or a booth from the awarding org and they’ll give you an award commensurate with your purchase.)
Even the legitimate ones will only have a few entrants, and if someone didn't win they may add a special category that you can be the only entrant for!
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.
> 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.
That would suck. If the faucet was in the middle, it would be where I put my face when I try to wash it in the sink.
I think this is a mismatch between the sink and the faucet and it’s totally the installer/chooser fault, not the faucet. There are sinks and sinks, the match has to work. In my rental there are two bathrooms. Both have the same faucet, different sink. One makes me bank my knuckles on the sink, the other one doesn’t (but it leaks). It can be done
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.
You do realize... There are many designs, styles, sizes of bathroom sink faucets. Typically the builder or person commissioning the build chooses the sink and the faucet fitures. You can change either...
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.
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.
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.
> you slap on a $5 cover and never enjoy the premium materials and physical design
It is ridiculous, I agree. I don’t use a case. I do have a thin screen protector. Anytime I handle anyone else’s phone, I think, “This is so clunky, and would barely fit in my pocket.”
"No case" worked for me for about 18 months. Now I'm forced to wear a case to keep the broken glass from cutting my fingers when picking up my phone (the back of the phone shattered but the front is perfectly fine with no screen protector). How / why the back of a phone would be made of a material that is essential glass is beyond me.
> How / why the back of a phone would be made of a material that is essential glass is beyond me.
For wireless charging.
If you pay for the extra warranty and break the glass screen you can replace it for $100. If you break the glass back the repair price is astronomical.
I don’t[1] use a cover for my phone and it seems mostly fine. Granted, I probably wouldn’t be super sad if it were to smash and I had to buy a replacement and maybe I’d be more careful if it would be worse for me. I’m also not so concerned about resale value and therefore micro scratches or slightly chipped/deformed corners. Maybe the newer design of iPhone is less rugged than the rounded design mine has.
Maybe I’m just good at being careful and not smashing it but I do plenty of other quite careless things.
Another thing to consider is that some people own expensive watches that can be many times more expensive than on iPhone. They don’t have covers (can get scratched up; if they have thin plating in a precious metal they can’t take much polishing; can be expensive to repair). I don’t know how bad it would be to smash the face of a watch on eg the corner of a table. Maybe only the crystal would need to be replaced or maybe the hands/dial would be damaged and expensive to repair. Maybe those people just aren’t so afraid to damage/replace their watch but I find that a little hard to believe.
[1] ok I did used to have a cover but I dropped my phone onto a tile floor from ~2.5m (using the flashlight to try to change the lightbulb in a windowless room) and damaged the cover so I stopped using and after that I didn’t really miss it. (And I have a headtorch now…)
> Maybe those people just aren’t so afraid to damage/replace their watch but I find that a little hard to believe.
It’s a Vleben good: it doesn’t simply signify that you have money to throw away, but shows that you have a lifestyle in which your expensive watch won’t get damaged.
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.
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.
Heh one of the most noticeable cases of this is when you buy something and unwrap it and find it covered in obvious "shelf marketing" stickers - your TV doesn't need a giant energy star sticker across the corner (and you have to remove it) nor does it need the specs on a little card attached to the base; but they do want those when it is the demo unit on the shelf, and they know that retail won't bother sticking them on, so they put them on every single product.
> I’ve been told there’s a follow up that concedes some of this and argues for emotional design.
Another excellent short book on evoking emotions in design is The Ice Palace That Melted Away, by Bill Stumpf (designer of the Aeron chair). Compares flying in a Boeing to a biplane, and other sensory experiences in design.
> 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.
A lot of this is really just needless anxiety though. I tended to go caseless until I had kids and they're pretty durable on their own. They will collect scratches and dings but honestly the only times my phone ever falls is when I'm wearing a certain pair of sweatpants with pockets that are too small.
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.
> Why hasn't Apple ever made a version with a built-in ruggedized case?
What would be the point? It might make it slightly slimmer, but for the most part I think people like having the choice in cases. iPhones are so ubiquitous that people put a lot of value in being able to personalize or set theirs apart.
> Why hasn't Apple ever made a version with a built-in ruggedized case?
The evil answer is that doing so would remove an income stream for Apple (repairs).
The less evil answer is that not enough people have said they want it, and Apple don't know if people want it or not. Not that that has stopped Apple from doing things before, but who knows, they do seem a bit more conservative today than before.
Yes but they know that many people (virtually everybody in my experience) immediately cover and bulk up that beautiful form. It's not really like them to say "well that's their choice to ruin our beautiful work" - it's clearly a very important function. I would think they would take the challenge to make a version that can withstand some abuse and still adhere to their aesthetic standards.
They sell leather cases which fulfill that purpose for most day to day usage. I use the Apple cases because they don’t bulk up he phone and provide just enough protection.
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). Yes, that's Don Norman who wrote the book referenced by the OP and also Jakob Nielsen (a.k.a. the king of usability) :-)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.