Donald Norman

Don Norman

Biography

Donald Arthur Norman, born December 25, 1935, is an American researcher, professor, and author. He studied at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, and completed his doctorate in 1962 with a thesis on sensory thresholds and response biases in detection experiments, advised by R. Duncan Luce.

He first retired from the University of California, San Diego, where he founded the Cognitive Science Department, in 1993. He then joined Apple as an Apple Fellow and became UX Architect of a three-person group called the User Experience Office, the first use of the term "user experience" in a job title. He later held an executive position at Hewlett-Packard. He also served as co-director of the MMM dual degree program at Northwestern University, which combined an MBA and an engineering degree with a design focus. He returned to UC San Diego to establish the Design Lab, and retired from it in 2020.

He remains Honorary Professor and Founding Director Emeritus of the Design Lab. He is also an honorary professor at Tongji University in Shanghai and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is a co-founder of CHI and received its lifetime achievement award, and is a fellow of the ACM, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, the Design Research Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

With Jakob Nielsen he co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group. He is a board member there and a member of the nonprofit charity The Don Norman Design Award and Summit. His website is jnd.org.

Contribution

Norman is best known for his work in design, usability engineering, and cognitive science, and shaped the development of cognitive systems engineering. He introduced and popularized affordances, signifiers, and the three levels of emotional design.

His central argument is that when a person fails to operate an object, the fault usually belongs to the design rather than the person. Feedback, mapping, and constraints are treated as variables the designer controls, and a failure in any of them produces behavior that gets misread as user error.

In The Design of Future Things he examined machines that act on their own initiative, arguing for a theory of human-machine interaction that engineers and industrial designers could put into practice. His more recent work has concerned complex sociotechnical systems and humanity-centered system design.

Selected Books

• The Design of Everyday Things (1988, as The Psychology of Everyday Things; revised and expanded 2013)
• Emotional Design
• The Design of Future Things (2007)
• Living with Complexity
• Design For a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered (2023)

Related Reading

• The Design of Everyday Things
• Designing Interactions
• Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition
• Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design
• The Psychology Of Everyday Living
• The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places

Related Reading

• Affordance
• Gulf of Execution
• Frictional Interface
• Steve Krug
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Designing Interactions