The Design of Everyday Things – Book Summary and Notes
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For example, the lever that controls the landing gear has a little tire for the knob. The flap controls have a knob shaped like a flap. All so you know what the control is without needing to look (or the cockpit is filled with smoke).
The common theme with all these designs is they are driven by accidents. For some strange reason, humans are pretty bad at creating intuitive designs. It's only usage that makes it clear, and it always seems obvious in hindsight.
For example, aviation has standardized phrases for things, to avoid confusion. For decades, the maximum power setting on the engines was "takeoff power". I kid you not. This was fixed after a crash caused by the pilot yelling "take off power" to do a go-round, and the copilot idled the engines. This was in civil aviation. The Air Force had to undergo a crash as well to change "takeoff power".
The lead Boeing cockpit designer of the 757 explained to me that every intuitive cockpit feature was paid for in blood.
I've always assumed that is because so few people care about design who are in power of affecting design. This is partially because it takes effort to think about a problem, and it's much easier to not care, or assume someone else will fix it.
The results of bad design (i.e. takeoff power from grandparent) are much easier to quantify and therefore easier to use to catalyze improvement.
This is why Apple, under Jobs, was so unique. He helped rebuild the company around design despite the fact that their obsession with design cost them loads of money (in the short term). In the longer term, their products' success has spoken for itself but you can bet that past shareholders/board members were constantly asking "do we need this?"
I wouldn't take that bet.
Jobs simply had a better sense of user interface design than others, and was in a position to get his way. It's not that others didn't care about it.
Luckily, I wasn't the first (or probably last) person to make that error.
One even had a "button" that you had to press to "unlock" the dial so you could turn it on, that one almost required a call to the desk.
At least once a week I get surprised by the hot water when washing my hands :)
For me, imperfections make them personal. I am repelled by people ('designers' ;)) looking at everything to find faults and point them out with pride. Tells me they never made a thing with bare hands all their life.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
The lesson I took away is to delete the door if you can figure out how to get the customer to agree.
This is my goal. UX that gets out of the way. People shouldn't stop to admire the light switch. They should just flick it.
Another was that obviousness of a feature is how that thing will be used. You don't want people placing stuff on top of walls, don't make them flat.
I think this is a bit too easy. After all it depends on what problem the thing is solving. E.g. if I think of lab test equipment you failing to use it properly might have nothing to do with the design and everything to do with you not having sufficient knowledge in the given domain.
I vehemently oppose the idea that everything needs to be usable without instruction. Sure, everything where it makes sense should be usable without instructions — but it does not make sense everywhere.
That btw. does not mean the design and usability of the lab test equipment cannot be improved uppon. I think any design can be improved uppon till you at least find a local maxima.
But not every design needs to be usable without instruction, because not every tool/object should be usable without instruction.
For other objects usability is simply a function of your ability to understand basic physics. If you e.g. hold a flashlight wrong enough you might emit light at an angle that wont properly illuminate the thing you are meant to illuminate. If you hold a microphone 50cm away and point it in the wrong direction and expect your voice to be heared well, you would have done better with instructions.
You know, cups and door handles.
Knowing which thing is meant to be an everyday thing and which is meant to require some domain specific knowledge is key. Trying to make some specialized tool easier to use than it should be, can harm the usability of the specialized thing. Treating an everyday object as a specialized thing when it is clearly not and pushing the burden of reading the object onto the user is also bad. Both problems can be observed (just think about documentation that starts with "this is completely trivial to use" and then it isn't).
As Dieter Rams said: Good design is honest. That means also that it should not hide the complexity of the actual problem people try to solve with this in a bad way.
The comment might read so if you don't have the context, but the context here is everyday things, as is obvious by the title (and the book).
The book also talks (which probably you're familiar with already then) about discerning what is a everyday thing vs not.
Dieter Rams is also mentioned in the book if I remember correctly, as examples of good user experience, especially since Rams mostly created designs for everyday things.
This is actually covered in the book. It's really worth a read. It's only ~300 pages with lots of those pages being pictures and diagrams.
The example I use, in my life, is Tokyo subway maps[1]. They look crazy complicated; and they are, because it's a complex system.
But after we learn it, using them is as natural as turning a door handle.
Its about common everyday things. We have a washing machine which I totally can't use without going through the manual, reading which number and which light does what. You shouldn't need to carefully go through a manual to just wash your clothes.
There is another book "User Interface Design for Programmers" by Joel Spolsky from which my take away was that no one is going to read all your manuals and documents.
Both of these essentially boil down to making things obvious for your end users.
I used to see this in church settings where someone would come up front to "give a testimony" (share a personal anecdote) and be handed a typical SM58-style vocal mic. They would hold it nearly at arms length pointed straight up, so they were talking off the side of this directional mic.
It drove the sound guys and the entire congregation nuts.
It should not be easy to use things wrongly, with more secret knowledge needed to use things that are more dangerous or require more skill than things that will do no harm when used wrongly.
In other words, your lab equipment should be fool-proofed so that if I walked into the lab and try to use it, I might get it loud buzzing sound a emoji of a sad face.
I am not the first to believe this. "Poka yoke" is a manufacturing term for a reason.
Think of the command line. It would drive me crazy if it didn't exist, because I'm a power user. But it's not a good interface for a novice, it fails several design guidelines, starting with lack of discoverability.
Lab equipment is even worse, since you -- a non-scientist -- are not even supposed to be touching it to begin with.
I do think that equipment with the potential to cause catastrophic failure (such as a nuclear reactor) should be designed in such a way that the critical error state cannot be entered easily. A silly human mistake shouldn't cause a reactor meltdown. (Do note modern nuclear reactors tend to "fail safe", so this is definitely a consideration!)
I didn't mean discovering the terminal app itself!
After reading this book, I realized that maybe if one person can’t program their VCR, you could have argued that it’s their fault. But certainly if so many people have problems with it, it’s clearly an issue with the design.
Arguably the VCRs did as well as they could - BUT they made the critical mistake of not realizing that programming and setting the clock would be difficult (and for many uses of the machine, not necessary at all, so nobody would bother figuring it out), and so didn't set the VCR to just not display the clock until the time was set. Very few people bought VCRs to use as a clock, after all.
If you weren't going to use that feature, yeah, it was pointless and could have just stayed blank rather than blinking 12:00 or whatever.
Which means that if you can't figure out how to set the time, you can just remember to disconnect the battery just before noon, and then reconnect it.
The flashing clock on a VCR is actually an error message because if it lost power/lost time, it won't record correctly until you tell it what time it is.
But if you have no timed recording setup, there's no need to report that error.
The other big lesson I took is about discoverability but I think most people here know about that, even if they don't really notice where it's terrible (Vim, CLIs, Python, etc.)
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6SC0QO0kVZI/YAyILg6A43I/AAAAAAAAV...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Carelman
To be picky the original title of the artwork is "coffe pot for masochists" as it was part of a (mock) "Catalogue of impossible things"
https://www.arretsurimages.net/articles/carelman-lintrouvabl...
[1] The book was originally published in 1988 with the title The Psychology of Everyday Things. Norman said his academic peers liked that title, but believed the new title better conveyed the content of the book and better attracted interested readers. It is often referred to by the initialisms POET and DOET. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things
It was also eye opening for my naive world view that awards are simply bought. A red dot award is basically pay sum x and you are guaranteed to "win".
There used to be a heart foundation tick on every second item of food in Australia. It was a paid award with a low bar. The award died when they started putting the tick on boxes of McDonald's chicken nuggets. Everyone immediately caught on that it was bullshit after that and the tick was seen as a laughing stock. The tick is no longer a thing at all since no one wanted their products to be seen in the same category as a McNugget.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2015-12-11/heart-tick-ret...
By "realized this" I really mean "I was shown this reality by the people in charge of paying for the service". I guess I should have know better, but my cynicism failed me in this instance!
You are absolutely right, it's all fluffy and intangible. I mean, it's all obviously good, and also every company says this about themselves. Whoever heard of a company advertising "toxic culture", "you'll never get a promotion", and "nobody knows anything about the company's health until it's bankrupt"?
I'm not sure I realized it before hearing about the payments myself though.
The spout where the water comes out is always so close to the far edge instead of to the middle of the sink.
Placing the spout so the water exits in the middle of the sink would be so much nicer. You wouldn't have to lean over, your hands wouldn't be hitting the back of the sink, and you'd have so much more room to wash your hands.
I stumbled upon the subreddit WTFaucet a while back and, while it isn't exclusive to the issue you highlighted, it brought me a lot of joy.
> The spout where the water comes out is always so close to the far edge instead of to the middle of the sink.
> Placing the spout so the water exits in the middle of the sink would be so much nicer. You wouldn't have to lean over, your hands wouldn't be hitting the back of the sink, and you'd have so much more room to wash your hands.
That would suck. If the faucet was in the middle, it would be where I put my face when I try to wash it in the sink.
I agree there should be a better model but I have never seen one.
I assume, like having lots of mirrored or glass furniture/surfaces, they're the kind of thing you get when all the cleaning (and much of the childcare) is done by "the help", who will just have to deal with whatever unhelpful-to-them design decisions you've made. And when you're in a house that has a dozen or more total sinks, so you've also got a "mud sink" somewhere that's better for utility-type things—and maybe one for each floor, if it's the kind of house that has a utility/laundry room on every floor. Not so viable in normal houses where every sink needs to be a multi-tasker.
The book argues very strongly for functional design and design that makes usage obvious. “The way you use a thing should be encoded in the way the thing is, not in a manual”. I’ve been told there’s a follow up that concedes some of this and argues for emotional design. Something a long the lines of “this thing doesn’t need this handle, but it makes the thing feel manageable and less intimidating”.
My biggest eye opener, though, was the idea of designing for display in the store versus usage at home.
An updated example for me is the iPhone. It has premium materials that are assembled with tiny tolerances and has a very nice feel in the hand. But once you’ve been impressed by these in the store and you buy it, you slap on a $5 cover and never enjoy the premium materials and physical design.
The reasonable thing would be to have the phone shell-less and with interchangeable covers, like an old Nokia phone, but that is not nice in the show room.
It is ridiculous, I agree. I don’t use a case. I do have a thin screen protector. Anytime I handle anyone else’s phone, I think, “This is so clunky, and would barely fit in my pocket.”
For wireless charging.
If you pay for the extra warranty and break the glass screen you can replace it for $100. If you break the glass back the repair price is astronomical.
- It lets wireless through.
- it’s design for the showroom, not at home. A plastic back would be better on most parameters. Lighter, sturdier and better grip.
But it lacks _luster_ and doesn’t feel or look premium. The glass back is great for the showroom. Not as great once you get home and start using it.
Maybe I’m just good at being careful and not smashing it but I do plenty of other quite careless things.
Another thing to consider is that some people own expensive watches that can be many times more expensive than on iPhone. They don’t have covers (can get scratched up; if they have thin plating in a precious metal they can’t take much polishing; can be expensive to repair). I don’t know how bad it would be to smash the face of a watch on eg the corner of a table. Maybe only the crystal would need to be replaced or maybe the hands/dial would be damaged and expensive to repair. Maybe those people just aren’t so afraid to damage/replace their watch but I find that a little hard to believe.
[1] ok I did used to have a cover but I dropped my phone onto a tile floor from ~2.5m (using the flashlight to try to change the lightbulb in a windowless room) and damaged the cover so I stopped using and after that I didn’t really miss it. (And I have a headtorch now…)
It’s a Vleben good: it doesn’t simply signify that you have money to throw away, but shows that you have a lifestyle in which your expensive watch won’t get damaged.
I wear the cheapest apple watch and could easily replace it if it breaks, but never has even when the limb bearing it has.
Another excellent short book on evoking emotions in design is The Ice Palace That Melted Away, by Bill Stumpf (designer of the Aeron chair). Compares flying in a Boeing to a biplane, and other sensory experiences in design.
A lot of this is really just needless anxiety though. I tended to go caseless until I had kids and they're pretty durable on their own. They will collect scratches and dings but honestly the only times my phone ever falls is when I'm wearing a certain pair of sweatpants with pockets that are too small.
YMMV on how well you can hold things naturally.
What would be the point? It might make it slightly slimmer, but for the most part I think people like having the choice in cases. iPhones are so ubiquitous that people put a lot of value in being able to personalize or set theirs apart.
The evil answer is that doing so would remove an income stream for Apple (repairs).
The less evil answer is that not enough people have said they want it, and Apple don't know if people want it or not. Not that that has stopped Apple from doing things before, but who knows, they do seem a bit more conservative today than before.
The most amazing thing was the way he taught. It was almost all stories and anecdotes. He didn't start with the theory he started with a problem or a situation, often a case study. He used the example as a way to explain the theory or the issue at hand. Ultimately you did read a lot of research or theoretical papers but because you started from a real world problem it was never boring.
At the time it was just a class that surprised me by being much more interesting than I expected. Ultimately it was about the most useful class I ever took.
I took HCI from him in undergrad and I had now idea who he was. I found the teaching style engaging but didn't give it much thought until 3 years later when I started working on consumer internet products.
I very much liked the book.
In the UI of the 2000’s, the UI is visible, the chrome is visible and it has meaning and utility. Buttons are easily found and pushed because they visibly look like they are extending from the display. That’s an affordance. The window corner used to have a “rough” texture just like exterior stairs have texture strips to keep your feet from slipping. They indicated that the friction from your mouse-pointer on the screen will move the window corner.
These designs allowed user decisions about UI function to exist in the subconscious where they weren’t a distraction from the actual problem at hand.
The bar these days seems to be “is it possible for the user to eventually accomplish their task?) as opposed to “how can we demand even less of the users’ brain for the task to be accomplished?”
I am anticipating this will not be a popular response, but I can’t help but think wrt/ UI design, we’ve collectively thrown out the baby with the bath water for vanity and it’s going to take some criticism to get it back.
Reading this book and studying the UI designs it inspired (ex: early to late 2000’s Mac UI) is IMO the best education a young UI-designer can get.
Edit: I don’t want to lay too much at the feet of designers because it’s probably Product Managers that also need to read this book and care about it.
"their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws” - DNANorman has also been involved in the whole UX movement for interfaces since... well, the beginning, since he was the first person who even had "User Experience" in their job title (when he started working at Apple).