Title: The Design of Everyday Things
Author: Donald Norman
Publisher: Basic Books (2002)
Summary: In the last chapter of The Design of Everyday Things, Norman discusses more modern technology, and some of the challenges facing it in the near future. This includes things such as Hypertext, and the often dreamed about, but never properly designed "Smart House" While discussing various user-centered design principals, he gives the reader several hints on how to design systems better, such as his list of "Seven Principals for Transforming Difficult Tasks Into Simple Ones".
Discussion: The final chapter of this novel was very interesting, in that Norman touched upon more "modern" technology, dating himself considerably in the process. The book was original published in 1988, so his references to Laser Disks noticeably stand out.
However, his observations about Hypertext and electronic books were eerily accurate. I was reading the book on my Amazon Kindle, so it was bizarre hearing him describe how we'll be able to jump around books using links, and pull up definitions of words as well, having just done these very tasks myself.
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