The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints.
The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time. In this entertaining and insightful analysis, cognitive scientist Don Norman hails excellence of design as the most important key to regaining the competitive edge in influencing consumer behavior. Now fully expanded and updated, with a new introduction by the author, The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how-and why-some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.
Score: 4. Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious -- even liberating -- book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how -- and why -- some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them. Norman presents a revealing examination of smart technology, from smooth-talking GPS units to cantankerous refrigerators.
Exploring the links between design and human psychology, he offers a consumer-oriented theory of natural human-machine interaction that can be put into practice by the engineers and industrial designers of tomorrow's thinking machines.
A fascinating look at the perils and promise of the intelligent objects of the future, The Design of Future Things is a must-read for anyone interested in the dawn of a new era in technology. It can take a toll on our pride. However, it is not our abilities that are at stake.
The primary purpose of design is to make objects intelligible and to make everyday life easier. This not only requires logic, but also a fair understanding of human psychology. Purchase this in-depth summary to learn more. Nearly everyone has encountered websites, software apps, cars, appliances, and other products that made them wonder what the designers were thinking. The Thoughtless Design of Everyday Things presents more than examples of products that violate nine fundamental design principles, along with suggestions for improving many of the flawed user interfaces and other design problems.
These examples of thoughtless design reveal 70 specific lessons that designers ought to heed as they craft the user experience. The Universe of Things. The Middle of Things. The Internet of Things. The Scheme of Things. Recommend Documents. The design everyday things Your name.
Close Send. Remember me Forgot password? Whether the device is a door or a stove, a mobile phone or a nuclear power plant, the relevant components must be visible, and they must communicate the correct message: What actions are possible? Where and how should they be done? With doors that push, the designer must provide signals that naturally indi- cate where to push.
These need not destroy the aesthetics. Put a vertical plate on the side to be pushed. Or make the supporting pillars visible. The vertical plate and supporting pillars are natural signals, naturally interpreted, making it easy to know just what to do: no labels needed.
With complex devices, discoverability and understanding re- quire the aid of manuals or personal instruction. We accept this if the device is indeed complex, but it should be unnecessary for simple things.
Many products defy understanding simply because they have too many functions and controls. They already do, much to our consternation. Faced one: The Psychopathology of Everyday Things 3 text. In England I visited a home with a fancy new Italian washer- dryer combination, with super-duper multisymbol controls, all to do everything anyone could imagine doing with the washing and drying of clothes.
The husband an engineering psychologist said he refused to go near it. The wife a physician said she had simply memorized one setting and tried to ignore the rest. I asked to see the manual: it was just as confusing as the device. The whole pur- pose of the design is lost.
The Complexity of Modern Devices All artificial things are designed. Whether it is the layout of fur- niture in a room, the paths through a garden or forest, or the in- tricacies of an electronic device, some person or group of people had to decide upon the layout, operation, and mechanisms. Not all designed things involve physical structures. Services, lectures, rules and procedures, and the organizational structures of busi- nesses and governments do not have physical mechanisms, but their rules of operation have to be designed, sometimes informally, sometimes precisely recorded and specified.
But even though people have designed things since prehistoric times, the field of design is relatively new, divided into many areas of specialty. Because everything is designed, the number of areas is enormous, ranging from clothes and furniture to complex control rooms and bridges. This book covers everyday things, focusing on the interplay between technology and people to ensure that the products actually fulfill human needs while being understand- able and usable.
In the best of cases, the products should also be delightful and enjoyable, which means that not only must the re- quirements of engineering, manufacturing, and ergonomics be sat- isfied, but attention must be paid to the entire experience, which means the aesthetics of form and the quality of interaction. The major areas of design relevant to this book are industrial design, interaction design, and experience design. None of the fields is well defined, but the focus of the efforts does vary, with industrial 4 The Design of Everyday Things text.
Interaction design: The focus is upon how people interact with tech- nology. Interaction de- sign draws upon principles of psychology, design, art, and emotion to ensure a positive, enjoyable experience.
Experience design: The practice of designing products, processes, ser- vices, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality and enjoyment of the total experience. Design is concerned with how things work, how they are con- trolled, and the nature of the interaction between people and technology. When done well, the results are brilliant, pleasurable products. When done badly, the products are unusable, leading to great frustration and irritation.
Or they might be usable, but force us to behave the way the product wishes rather than as we wish. Machines, after all, are conceived, designed, and constructed by people. By human standards, machines are pretty limited. They do not maintain the same kind of rich history of experiences that people have in common with one another, experiences that enable us to interact with others because of this shared understanding. Instead, machines usually follow rather simple, rigid rules of be- havior.
If we get the rules wrong even slightly, the machine does what it is told, no matter how insensible and illogical. People are imaginative and creative, filled with common sense; that is, a lot of valuable knowledge built up over years of experience. But instead of capitalizing on these strengths, machines require us to be precise and accurate, things we are not very good at. Machines have no one: The Psychopathology of Everyday Things 5 text.
Moreover, many of the rules followed by a machine are known only by the machine and its designers. When people fail to follow these bizarre, secret rules, and the machine does the wrong thing, its operators are blamed for not understanding the machine, for not following its rigid specifica- tions. With everyday objects, the result is frustration. With complex devices and commercial and industrial processes, the resulting difficulties can lead to accidents, injuries, and even deaths.
It is time to reverse the situation: to cast the blame upon the machines and their design. It is the machine and its design that are at fault. It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.
The reasons for the deficiencies in human-machine interaction are numerous. Some come from self-imposed restrictions by the designers, often to hold down cost. But most of the problems come from a complete lack of understanding of the design principles necessary for effective human-machine interaction. Why this deficiency?
Be- cause much of the design is done by engineers who are experts in technology but limited in their understanding of people. Those who have not studied human behavior often think it is pretty simple. As a result, they come to believe that all people must think this way, and they design their machines accordingly. When people have trouble, the engineers are upset, but often for the wrong reason. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.
Even after I switched into psychology and cognitive science, I still maintained my engineering emphasis upon logic and mechanism. It took a long time for me to realize that my understanding of human behavior was relevant to my in- terest in the design of technology. As I watched people struggle with technology, it became clear that the difficulties were caused by the technology, not the people.
I was called upon to help analyze the American nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island the island name comes from the fact that it is located on a river, three miles south of Middle- town in the state of Pennsylvania. In this incident, a rather simple mechanical failure was misdiagnosed. This led to several days of difficulties and confusion, total destruction of the reactor, and a very close call to a severe radiation release, all of which brought the American nuclear power industry to a complete halt.
The moral was simple: we were designing things for people, so we needed to understand both technology and people. My work with that committee changed my view of design.
To- day, I realize that design presents a fascinating interplay of tech- nology and psychology, that the designers must understand both. Engineers still tend to believe in logic. They often explain to me in great, logical detail, why their designs are good, powerful, and wonderful. So we must design our ma- chines on the assumption that people will make errors. Chapter 5 provides a detailed analysis of human error. Human-Centered Design People are frustrated with everyday things.
From the ever-increasing complexity of the automobile dashboard, to the increasing auto- mation in the home with its internal networks, complex music, video, and game systems for entertainment and communication, and the increasing automation in the kitchen, everyday life some- times seems like a never-ending fight against confusion, continued errors, frustration, and a continual cycle of updating and maintain- ing our belongings.
In the multiple decades that have elapsed since the first edition of this book was published, design has gotten better. There are now many books and courses on the topic.
But even though much has improved, the rapid rate of technology change outpaces the ad- vances in design. New technologies, new applications, and new methods of interaction are continually arising and evolving. New industries spring up. Each new development seems to repeat the mistakes of the earlier ones; each new field requires time before it, too, adopts the principles of good design. And each new inven- tion of technology or interaction technique requires experimenta- tion and study before the principles of good design can be fully integrated into practice.
So, yes, things are getting better, but as a result, the challenges are ever present. The solution is human-centered design HCD , an approach that puts human needs, capabilities, and behavior first, then de- signs to accommodate those needs, capabilities, and ways of be- having.
Good design starts with an understanding of psychology and technology. Good design requires good communication, espe- cially from machine to person, indicating what actions are possible, what is happening, and what is about to happen. Communica- tion is especially important when things go wrong.
It is relatively easy to design things that work smoothly and harmoniously as 8 The Design of Everyday Things text. The Role of HCD and Design Specializations Experience design Industrial design These are areas of focus Interaction design Human-centered design The process that ensures that the designs match the needs and capa- bilities of the people for whom they are intended long as things go right.
But as soon as there is a problem or a mis- understanding, the problems arise. This is where good design is essential. Designers need to focus their attention on the cases where things go wrong, not just on when things work as planned.
Actually, this is where the most satisfaction can arise: when some- thing goes wrong but the machine highlights the problems, then the person understands the issue, takes the proper actions, and the problem is solved.
When this happens smoothly, the collaboration of person and device feels wonderful. Human-centered design is a design philosophy. It means start- ing with a good understanding of people and the needs that the design is intended to meet. This understanding comes about pri- marily through observation, for people themselves are often un- aware of their true needs, even unaware of the difficulties they are encountering.
Getting the specification of the thing to be defined is one of the most difficult parts of the design, so much so that the HCD principle is to avoid specifying the problem as long as pos- sible but instead to iterate upon repeated approximations. This is done through rapid tests of ideas, and after each test modifying the approach and the problem definition.
The results can be products that truly meet the needs of people. Doing HCD within the rigid time, budget, and other constraints of industry can be a challenge: Chapter 6 examines these issues.
Where does HCD fit into the earlier discussion of the several dif- ferent forms of design, especially the areas called industrial, inter- action, and experience design? These are all compatible. HCD is a philosophy and a set of procedures, whereas the others are areas of focus see Table 1. Fundamental Principles of Interaction Great designers produce pleasurable experiences.
Experience: note the word. Engineers tend not to like it; it is too subjective. But when I ask them about their favorite automobile or test equipment, they will smile delightedly as they discuss the fit and finish, the sensa- tion of power during acceleration, their ease of control while shift- ing or steering, or the wonderful feel of the knobs and switches on the instrument. Those are experiences. Experience is critical, for it determines how fondly people re- member their interactions.
Was the overall experience positive, or was it frustrating and confusing? When our home technology be- haves in an uninterpretable fashion we can become confused, frus- trated, and even angry—all strong negative emotions. When there is understanding it can lead to a feeling of control, of mastery, and of satisfaction or even pride—all strong positive emotions. Cog- nition and emotion are tightly intertwined, which means that the designers must design with both in mind.
When we interact with a product, we need to figure out how to work it. This means discovering what it does, how it works, and what operations are possible: discoverability. Discoverability re- sults from appropriate application of five fundamental psycholog- ical concepts covered in the next few chapters: affordances, signifiers, constraints, mappings, and feedback. But there is a sixth principle, perhaps most important of all: the conceptual model of the system.
It is the conceptual model that provides true understanding. So I now turn to these fundamental principles, starting with affor- dances, signifiers, mappings, and feedback, then moving to con- ceptual models. Constraints are covered in Chapters 3 and 4. Every day we encounter thousands of objects, many of them new to us.
Many of the new objects are similar to ones we already 10 The Design of Everyday Things text. How do we do this? Why is it that when we encounter many unusual natural objects, we know how to interact with them?
Why is this true with many of the artificial, human-made objects we encounter? The an- swer lies with a few basic principles.
Some of the most important of these principles come from a consideration of affordances. The term affordance refers to the relationship between a physi- cal object and a person or for that matter, any interacting agent, whether animal or human, or even machines and robots.
An affor- dance is a relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used. Most chairs can also be carried by a single per- son they afford lifting , but some can only be lifted by a strong person or by a team of people. If young or relatively weak people cannot lift a chair, then for these people, the chair does not have that affordance, it does not afford lifting.
The presence of an affordance is jointly determined by the qual- ities of the object and the abilities of the agent that is interacting.
This relational definition of affordance gives considerable difficulty to many people. We are used to thinking that properties are asso- ciated with objects. But affordance is not a property. An affordance is a relationship.
Whether an affordance exists depends upon the properties of both the object and the agent. Glass affords transparency. At the same time, its physical struc- ture blocks the passage of most physical objects. As a result, glass affords seeing through and support, but not the passage of air or most physical objects atomic particles can pass through glass.
The blockage of passage can be considered an anti-affordance—the prevention of interaction. To be effective, affordances and anti- affordances have to be discoverable—perceivable. This poses a difficulty with glass.
The reason we like glass is its relative invis- ibility, but this aspect, so useful in the normal window, also hides its anti-affordance property of blocking passage. As a result, birds often try to fly through windows. And every year, numerous peo- ple injure themselves when they walk or run through closed glass one: The Psychopathology of Everyday Things 11 text.
If an affordance or anti-affordance cannot be perceived, some means of signaling its presence is re- quired: I call this property a signifier discussed in the next section.
The notion of affordance and the insights it provides originated with J. Gibson, an eminent psychologist who provided many advances to our understanding of human perception.
I had in- teracted with him over many years, sometimes in formal confer- ences and seminars, but most fruitfully over many bottles of beer, late at night, just talking.
We disagreed about almost everything. I was an engineer who became a cognitive psychologist, trying to understand how the mind works. He started off as a Gestalt psy- chologist, but then developed an approach that is today named after him: Gibsonian psychology, an ecological approach to percep- tion. He pointed out that all the senses work together, that we pick up information about the world by the combined result of all of them.
For designers, their visibility is critical: visible affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. A flat plate mounted on a door affords push- ing. Knobs afford turning, pushing, and pulling. Slots are for in- serting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. Perceived affordances help people figure out what actions are possible with- out the need for labels or instructions. I call the signaling compo- nent of affordances signifiers.
The first edition of this book introduced the term affordances to the world of design. The design community loved the concept and affordances soon prop- agated into the instruction and writing about design. I soon found mention of the term everywhere. Alas, the term became used in ways that had nothing to do with the original.
Many people find affordances difficult to understand because they are relationships, not properties. Designers deal with fixed properties, so there is a temptation to say that the property is an affordance. But that is not the only problem with the concept of affordances. Designers have practical problems.
They need to know how to design things to make them understandable. They soon discov- ered that when working with the graphical designs for electronic displays, they needed a way to designate which parts could be touched, slid upward, downward, or sideways, or tapped upon.
The actions could be done with a mouse, stylus, or fingers. Some systems responded to body motions, gestures, and spoken words, with no touching of any physical device. How could designers de- scribe what they were doing? There was no word that fit, so they took the closest existing word—affordance. That is a way of communicating where the touch should be. You are communicating where to do the touching: the one: The Psychopathology of Everyday Things 13 text.
Eventually I gave up: designers needed a word to describe what they were doing, so they chose affordance. What alternative did they have? I decided to provide a better answer: signifiers. Affordances determine what actions are possible.
Signifiers communicate where the action should take place. We need both. People need some way of understanding the product or service they wish to use, some sign of what it is for, what is happening, and what the alternative actions are. People search for clues, for any sign that might help them cope and understand.
It is the sign that is important, anything that might signify meaningful informa- tion. Designers need to provide these clues. What people need, and what designers must provide, are signifiers.
Good design requires, among other things, good communication of the purpose, struc- ture, and operation of the device to the people who use it. That is the role of the signifier. The term signifier has had a long and illustrious career in the ex- otic field of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols. But just as I appropriated affordance to use in design in a manner somewhat different than its inventor had intended, I use signifier in a some- what different way than it is used in semiotics.
For me, the term signifier refers to any mark or sound, any perceivable indicator that communicates appropriate behavior to a person. Signifiers can be deliberate and intentional, such as the sign push on a door, but they may also be accidental and unintentional, such as our use of the visible trail made by previous people walk- ing through a field or over a snow-covered terrain to determine the best path.
Or how we might use the presence or absence of people waiting at a train station to determine whether we have missed the train. I explain these ideas in more detail in my book Living with Complexity. Problem Doors: Signifiers Are Needed. Door hardware can signal whether to push or pull without signs, but the hardware of the two doors in the upper photo, A, are identical even though one should be pushed, the other pulled. The flat, ribbed horizontal bar has the obvious perceived affordance of pushing, but as the signs indicate, the door on the left is to be pulled, the one on the right is to be pushed.
In the bottom pair of photos, B and C, there are no visible signifiers or affordances. How does one know which side to push? Trial and error. When external signifiers—signs— have to be added to something as simple as a door, it indicates bad design. Photographs by the author.
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