Book Review: Design of Everyday Things

Genere Philosophy

Pages  368

Author Don Norman 

Year of Publish 1988

Book Summary of Design of Everyday Things

As the title suggest, this book is about designing of things that we use in our daily life  such as building a door, taps and electronic equipment and also about psychology of designing the products. But if readers just want to discover the design thinking principles, then this book might be a bit "heavy" for them, as they may encounter repetition. In contrast,   if readers are really interested in the topic and has some initial visibility, then this book is  classic.  Design of Everyday things is on the mandatory reading book in many design schools. I originally wanted to be a car designer, so I really enjoyed it.  In fact, from now on, I think, I will be able to connect the ideas discussed in the book, when I encounter things that are designed very well, or very badly. 

What I inferred basically is that  the book is around discussing the emotional plea of design - based on usability, aesthetics and cost ( materials, manufacturing etc). Though, these factors are also important, but they matter more to the manufacturers and more often to the corporate. However, when the product comes to end user, it is found, they struggle to comprehend how to use it.
Designing for usability is probably more complex than we think. Even for something as small and seemingly simple as a ballpoint pen. Author suggest, we could overcome this complexity, if we could learn from our mistakes. But the multiple forces of a competitive market often prevent this process of evolutionary design. As a result, the same mistakes get made over and over again, and new mistakes are constantly added too on the back of new technologies. The same technology which are actually supposed to make our lives easier.  Norman calls this "the Paradox of Technology".

To overcome this, Norman proposes "Seven principles for transforming difficult tasks into simple ones":

1. "Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head." 
The design of the object should help the user to form a good "conceptual model" or "mental map" of how it works, preferably without instruction labels (if it needs them, it's probably not designed very well) or  because most users don't read them anyway. 

2. "Simplify the structure of tasks." 
Don't rely on the user to remember too many things at once, because our memory is limited.

3. "Make things visible: bridge the gulfs of Execution and Evaluation." 
It means, making it obvious what  actions the user can/should take, and provide feedback when he/she has taken that action.

4. "Get the mappings right." 
That it,  the left switch is for the left light, the right switch is for the right one.

5. "Exploit the power of constraints, both natural and artificial." 
If you don't want people to insert the battery the wrong way, then make sure it doesn't fit that way. This is a physical constraint, but there are also semantic, cultural and logical ones. The Japanese management philosophy, 'Poka-Yoke' teaches the same about error proofing the process.

6. "Design for error." 
Errors are not bad, they are normal.  Design things in such a way that trivial errors are easily reversed ("undo") and serious errors are avoided in the first place. The categorization and control of common cause and special cause errors has been discussed in detail in  Out of Crisis.

7. "When all else fails, standardize." 
Bad design cannot be patched up with labels, instructions manuals, or training courses. When natural mappings are difficult, we must standardize the actions, outcomes and layout
Standardization– is a way to deal with things that cannot be design without arbitrary mappings
Standardize– Give people the icons and the navigation that they are expecting

Facilitating user success should be a top priority for designers  between usability and aesthetics.  Author discovered  that to make something easy to use, we need to map the number of controls to the number of functions and organize the controls according to function. 
To make something look like it is easy, one must minimize the number of controls. Hide the controls not being used at the moment , just like how apple revolutionized the mobile industry by removing qwerty keyboard. By having a separate control for each function, you minimize the complexity of use.  

Conclusion 

Undoubtedly, the ideas discussed in the book are profound. Even though, it was published in 1988, its principles as passed and will pass the test of time. Technology  is tightening our lives with every passing day it becomes empirical to design products with a sense that technology is for us and and we are not for technology.

On the hindside, I think the book could have been structured more clearly, considering it is a book about design I sometimes got a little bit "lost" in the text. It would have been better to display the seven principles in the table of contents. Maybe dull looking but definitely very usable. :)

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