Book Review: The Design of Everyday Things

Finishing The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman leaves me feeling like I’ve just joined a high-end cult.

Reading it made me feel like an uneducated rube that had just gone through a crash course taught by a genius-level professor. Norman respects his readers. He’s earned respect in industry that goes back decades.

This is a book of principles. It’ll hold up decades from now.

The book used to be entitled The Psychology of Everday Things, but as Norman explains in the introduction, it lead to the book being mis-categorized in bookstores. It felt almost as revelatory as one of the many affecting psychology books that I’ve read. Instead of human on human relations, this book puts man-on-thing relations on the couch.

The author writes

“Each time a new technology comes along, new designers make the same horrible mistakes as their predecessors. Technologists are not noted for learning from the errors of the past. They look forward, not behind, so they repeat the same problems over and over again.”

This is much like other human endeavors, from politics to love relationships. Technologists often find new ways to reincarnate ancient errors. Norman writes that ”we are surrounded with objects of desire, not objects of use.” Bad but flashy products that succeed on the marketplace are like beautiful girls with big breasts that also have vacuous minds and cruel temperaments.

Norman suggests that designers should “Analyze a task, and… see how it can be made easier.” Developers are more likely to analyze some existing interface and how its aesthetics can be altered. Instead, it’s better to ask what task you want the user to accomplish and to remove any impediments to them.

The author’s observation that…

“It is the rare organization that is content to let a good product stand or to let natural evolution perfect it slowly. No, each year a “new, improved” model must come out, usually incorporating new features that do not use the old as a starting point. In far too many instances, the results spell disaster for the consumer.”

…left a bitter feeling in me. Companies like Twitter seem to be superb at this (ignoring a few mis-steps). Most others aren’t. There’s nothing wrong with picking a popular problem that a lot of people want solved and then delivering a more effective solution for it at a great price.

The Design of Everyday Things fits well with a running theme in most of the books that I’ve read recently: the limitations of the mind. A major error that I grew up believing was that there were “no real mental limits” — that mental exhaustion was some combination of moral failing and laziness. It’s been rough for me to learn my own limitations and to understand those of others.

It may not be as cathartic a discovery as a personal psychological breakthrough, but the book persuaded me to stop blaming myself and to never again blame a user for a failure to understand a product. Once you accept this, it becomes easier to critique existing designs — because when you fail to understand something, you can halt the impulse to self-attack for screwing up and blame the product instead.

Be the kid in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes when it comes to design. It seems like so many products are build from the perspective of that emperor and his sycophantic courtiers. This short (~200 page) book provides a usable toolkit for both critiquing existing design and building usable products.

Edmund X White

I like what you are saying about understanding the limitations of your own mind and working within it. I recently had that experience reading the Introvert Advantage.

Maybe this is addressed in the book — I haven’t read it — but one problem with ground up design is that it lacks all the iterations the existing product has gone through. First versions of products often lack important design aspects because at some point you run out of money and have to ship. It usually takes many iterations before even the designers are satisfied with the product.

Also new designs tend to lack soul. What I mean by this is that users tend to find all sorts of uses for products that the designers can’t anticipate. Whether it’s using the product in an alternative way to achieve it’s primary function or to solve an entirely different function altogether. New designs are often much more uni-purpose than classic designs; this can be true or just a perception because the design is unfamiliar.

There is a huge risk and expense in brand new designs and what can often happen is that people don’t want them even if they are considerably better. This can be because better is defined too narrowly, or because it is missing key functions for that individual, or for a variety of psychological reasons.

http://twitter.com/jckhewitt JC Hewitt

Thanks. As a semi-closeted introvert, that sounds like a book worth reading.

It is addressed in the book, and it distinguishes between the right kind of iterative improvement and the wrong kind. Norman writes:”It is the rare organization that is content to let a good product stand or to let natural evolution perfect it slowly. No, each year a “new, improved” model must come out, usually incorporating new features that do not use the old as a starting point. In far too many instances, the results spell disaster for the consumer.”

Finding the right people willing to risk the kinks of a new design is one of the toughest jobs at a startup or when launching a new product.

Edmund X White

Very interesting. Thanks for the clarification, I would agree. I got an email from RIM today saying now is a great time to upgrade my blackberry claiming “The arrival of the Smartphone Revolution.”