The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition Paperback – by Don Norman (Basic Books)

We live in a world made of things. And far too many of those things are clumsy, stupid, painful to use, subtracting seconds, pleasure, and safety from our world. In this updated version of the classic The Psychology of Everyday Thing Things, Norman offers a quick introduction to human-centered design, a field that he pioneered, and to design as a discipline which can make the world better for human beings.

There are lots of examples and exhortations to be better designers, but the actual guidance is surprisingly light. Norman describes designed things in terms of affordances: the relationship between an objects, its environment, and users that describe what a thing can and cannot do, signifiers: which indicate the presence of affordances, mappings: which descriobe the relationship between controls and actions, feedback: which indicates the success or failure of a given course of action, and conceptual models: how a user imagines a device to work.

To these, Norman adds a seven stage action cycle. Starting with a goal, users plan, specify, and perform, executing a task in the world. Then they evaluate (perceive, interpret and compare) to see if the goal has been accomplished. People often make mistakes in this cycle, particularly due to the fallibilities of short term memory, or missing important information which is buried or not provided properly.

The acme of a designer is to stay as close to the customer as possible through this cycle, to understand what their goals really are, and their pre-existing cognitive models, and then come up with a thing that helps them achieve it. Marketers and engineers and bosses will be driven by what is possible, with matching the competition feature for feature. Designers need to advocate for their customers, for the idea of a more elegant world.

I enjoyed this book. It’s a fine introduction with a solid bibliography that deserves more attention. It seems a little basic for a design class, but I could definitely see using in an intro STS course. Of course in a perfect example of how not to do design, the Kindle edition does not allow you to easily expand the very small diagrams to readable levels.