The Design of Everyday Things

Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.

Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible,

Principles of design:1. Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head.2. Simplify the structure of tasks.3. Make things visible: bridge gulfs between Execution and Evaluation.4. Get the mappings right.5. Exploit the power of constraints.6. Design for error.7. When all else fails, standardize.

Rule of thumb: if you think something is clever and sophisticated beware-it is probably self-indulgence.

A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem.

The idea that a person is at fault when something goes wrong is deeply entrenched in society. That’s why we blame others and even ourselves. Unfortunately, the idea that a person is at fault is imbedded in the legal system. When major accidents occur, official courts of inquiry are set up to assess the blame. More and more often the blame is attributed to “human error.” The person involved can be fined, punished, or fired. Maybe training procedures are revised. The law rests comfortably. But in my experience, human error usually is a result of poor design: it should be called system error. Humans err continually; it is an intrinsic part of our nature. System design should take this into account. Pinning the blame on the person may be a comfortable way to proceed, but why was the system ever designed so that a single act by a single person could cause calamity? Worse, blaming the person without fixing the root, underlying cause does not fix the problem: the same error is likely to be repeated by someone else.

Fail often, fail fast,

Cognition attempts to make sense of the world: emotion assigns value.

Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.

The problem with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.

Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.

It is easy to design devices that work well when everything goes as planned. The hard and necessary part of design is to make things work well even when things do not go as planned.

The vicious cycle starts: if you fail at something, you think it is your fault. Therefore you think you can’t do that task. As a result, next time you have to do the task, you believe you can’t, so you don’t even try. The result is that you can’t, just as you thought.

Norman’s Law: The day the product team is announced, it is behind schedule and over its budget.

A story tells of Henry Ford’s buying scrapped Ford cars and having his engineers disassemble them to see which parts failed and which were still in good shape. Engineers assumed this was done to find the weak parts and make them stronger. Nope. Ford explained that he wanted to find the parts that were still in good shape. The company could save money if they redesigned these parts to fail at the same time as the others.

One way of overcoming the fear of the new is to make it look like the old.

When things go right, people credit their own abilities and intelligence. The onlookers do the reverse. When they see things go well for someone else, they sometimes credit the environment, or luck.

Finally, people have to actually purchase it. It doesn’t matter how good a product is if, in the end, nobody uses it.

Poor feedback can be worse than no feedback at all, because it is distracting, uninformative, and in many cases irritating and anxiety-provoking.

In the university, professors make up artificial problems. In the real world, the problems do not come in nice, neat packages. They have to be discovered.

The design of everyday things is in great danger of becoming the design of superfluous, overloaded, unnecessary things.

It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.

original ideas are the easy part. Actually producing the idea as a successful product is what is hard.

If designers and researchers do not sometimes fail, it is a sign that they are not trying hard enough—they are not thinking the great creative thoughts that will provide breakthroughs in how we do things. It is possible to avoid failure, to always be safe. But that is also the route to a dull, uninteresting life.

Affordances define what actions are possible. Signifiers specify how people discover those possibilities: signifiers are signs, perceptiblesignals of what can be done. Signifiers are of far more importance to designers than are affordances.

The vicious cycle starts: if you fail at something, you think it is your fault. Therefore you think you can’t do that task. As a result, next time you have to do the task, you believe you can’t, so you don’t even try. The result is that you can’t, just as you thought. You’re trapped in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Cognition and emotion cannot be separated. Cognitive thoughts lead to emotions: emotions drive cognitive thoughts. The brain is structured to act upon the world, and every action carries with it expectations, and these expectations drive emotions. That is why much of language is based on physical metaphors, why the body and its interaction with the environment are essential components of human thought. Emotion is highly underrated. In fact, the emotional system is a powerful information processing system that works in tandem with cognition. Cognition attempts to make sense of the world: emotion assigns value. It is the emotional system that determines whether a situation is safe or threatening, whether something that is happening is good or bad, desirable or not. Cognition provides understanding: emotion provides value judgments. A human without a working emotional system has difficulty making choices. A human without a cognitive system is dysfunctional.

Don't criticize unless you can do better. Try to understand how the faulty design might have occurred: try to determine how it could have been done otherwise.

In design, one of the most difficult activities is to get the specifications right:

If the system lets you make the error, it is badly designed.