Reference Information
Title: Design of Everyday Things
Author: Donald Norman
Publisher: Basic Books (2002)
Summary
"The Design of Everyday Things" discusses the elements of good and bad design. Norman offers many examples to support his assertions. He begins his book by explaining the importance of establishing conceptual models and product maps. He then describes the psychology of everyday actions. A lot of times the user can get discouraged and understanding how they perceive the world is important to notice.
Norman also talks about erroring. Erring is human, he says and usually it is broken down into a couple of categories: slips and mistakes. Mistakes are something that should be designed to minimize. Human error should be one of the biggest considerations in a design. A lot of times however, it is difficult to imagine the different ways someone will use your product.
Part of good design is showing restraint. A lot of time people get very caught up in adding a lot of features that they lose sight of the aesthetics of a product and affect usability. He concludes with a chapter on transforming difficult tasks into simple ones.
Discussion
I thought that this book was a great read and is very insightful. Design is a hard thing to learn/teach and he clearly knows a lot about what good (and poor) design entails. I learned a lot from reading this book and hopefully that knowledge will be useful later on.
Norman also talks about erroring. Erring is human, he says and usually it is broken down into a couple of categories: slips and mistakes. Mistakes are something that should be designed to minimize. Human error should be one of the biggest considerations in a design. A lot of times however, it is difficult to imagine the different ways someone will use your product.
Part of good design is showing restraint. A lot of time people get very caught up in adding a lot of features that they lose sight of the aesthetics of a product and affect usability. He concludes with a chapter on transforming difficult tasks into simple ones.
Discussion
I thought that this book was a great read and is very insightful. Design is a hard thing to learn/teach and he clearly knows a lot about what good (and poor) design entails. I learned a lot from reading this book and hopefully that knowledge will be useful later on.
I also found this book very insightful. I agree that design is hard to teach, it's stuck in that unusual place between functionality and ascetic. The two can be very hard to balance sometimes. I too hope that we can apply this book's principals in the future.
ReplyDelete(Also, since this is a full blog post, I think you may need to do comments for it. Just a head's up.)