Reference Information:
Title: Design of Everyday Things
Author: Donald Norman
Publisher: Basic Books (2002)
Summary: In Norman's book, The Design of Everyday Things, he discusses, as the title suggests, the various factors which go into designing all of the modern items we come across in our life. While the principals he discusses are invaluable when designing something complex such as a typewriter, they hold equally true when designing much simpler things, such as a telephone or a door.
Norman's central theme throughout the book is "It's not your fault". A well designed product should cue the reader into how to perform its functions through its form, and unfortunately very few items today are designed enough to do that well. Norman goes into great detail about how users create "mental models" of the item they're using, and if the mental model the user envisions does not match the one the designer envisioned when creating the device, confusion often arises.
Although this book is written for the technically minded, and all of it's principals can and should be used on complicated products, Norman focuses mostly very simple examples. This is useful for showing key aspects of the principal he's trying to demonstrate, and it also has the added advantage of not dating the book. While the standard desktop telephone hasn't undergone many design changes in the last 20 years, Norman makes several references to Laser Disks and the emerging field of hypertext documents in the last chapter. By sticking with generalities, Norman lets his examples maintain relevancy with the reader, no matter when they read the book, or what the latest technology is.
Discussion: This was my favorite of the first three books we read. I've always been interested in design, so it was incredibly interesting to see all the thought (or lack of thought) which goes into designing everyday mundane objects. It was often humorous to see Norman go on and on about an office phone for almost an entire chapter, but he always was able to get his points across, and the book was very enlightening.
In regards to your comment on my blog, I was looking at the discussion board and saw this:
ReplyDeletehttp://groups.google.com/group/csce-436-computer-human-interaction-spring-2011/browse_thread/thread/307a61d2baa75f8
I agree with you in that the style of the book is just perfect. It's just technical enough to teach these lessons about design to everyone, and just clever and funny enough to stay interesting. It was also kind of creepy to see those predictions he had in one chapter that were nearly perfect to some of the devices we have today.
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