The Design of Everyday Things

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The Design of Everyday Things

Author

Donald Norman. Originally published in 1988 as The Psychology of Everyday Things, retitled for the 1990 paperback edition. Norman was a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and later worked at Apple, where his title was User Experience Architect. He co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group with Jakob Nielsen.

Description

Norman's argument is that when a person fails to operate an object, the fault usually belongs to the design rather than the person. Doors that get pushed when they should be pulled, stovetops whose burner controls map to no obvious burner, and light switches that require memorization are treated as evidence of design failure rather than user error.

The book introduces a set of terms that became standard vocabulary in interaction design. Affordances are the possible actions an object suggests through its physical form. Signifiers indicate where an action should take place. Mappings describe the relationship between a control and its effect, and natural mappings are those where the arrangement of controls matches the arrangement of the things they control. Feedback tells the user that an action registered. Constraints limit possible actions so that incorrect ones become difficult or impossible.

Norman also describes the gulf of execution, which is the distance between what a user wants to do and the actions the system makes available, and the gulf of evaluation, which is the distance between the state the system is in and the user's ability to perceive that state. Much of the book consists of methods for narrowing both.

For calm technology work the relevant contribution is the treatment of feedback as a design variable with a correct amount. Too little feedback leaves the user checking and rechecking. Too much produces a device that interrupts constantly. Norman's position is that the information a device provides should match what the user needs to act on, delivered at the moment it becomes actionable.

The revised and expanded edition, published in 2013, adds material on human-centered design process and on the design of systems rather than single objects.

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