Comment by jasonhong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonhong | Hacker News Reader

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I've used The Design of Everyday Things in many classes I teach. I would agree that it's not practical, but that's not its goal. Instead, it gives you frameworks for thinking about things as well as vocabulary for talking about those things.

Off the top of my head, some of the key ideas include:

* Affordances, that objects should have (often visual) cues that give hints as to how to use things * Mental models, that every design has three different models, namely system implementation, design model, and user model, and that the design model and user model should try to match each other * Gulf of Evaluation (the gap between the current system state and people's understanding of it) and Gulf of Execution (the gap between what people want the system to do and how to use the system to do it) * Kinds of Errors and how to design to prevent and recover from them, e.g. slips (chose the right action but accidentally did the wrong thing, e.g. fat finger) vs mistakes (chose the wrong action to do)

What's particularly useful about Norman's book is that these key ideas apply for all kinds of user interfaces, from command-line to GUI to voice-only to AR/VR to AI chatbot. I'd encourage you to think about this book in this kind of framing, that it gives you general frameworks for reasoning and talking about UX problems rather than specific practical solutions.

DOET (neé Psychology of Everyday Things) deeply influenced me. Articulated things I had observed, experienced. Expanded my thinking.

I was using, teaching, and developing for AutoCAD at the time. Knew nothing about UI beyond my intuition. Just perplexed by how difficult it was for most to use.

Reflecting back, Norman's treatment of mental models and kinds of errors were the most impactful, evergreen design challenges I faced.

I read the Design of Everyday Things and most of it was painfully obvious examples and was overly philosophical.

Design is solving problems so they're intuitive for the user. Obviously a door with a handle shouldn't be a push door, I don't really think you need to write a book about it. And the types of people creating bad design are generally constrained by cost, time, or practicality, not necessarily by education.

uh, the fact that this is written down and carefully put in frameworks is a good thing. Otherwise you can say any academic book is intuitive. the fact that it sounds obvious means they're getting the message across. because lord knows it was needed and there's plenty of failed products and ideas because of shitty design.

> Obviously a door with a handle shouldn't be a push door, I don't really think you need to write a book about it.

It’s common to illustrate principles with examples that appear obvious, i.e. that everyone agrees on, so that after having it conceptualized as a principle, you’ll apply it in less obvious circumstances. Many things are obvious only in hindsight.

> And the types of people creating bad design are generally constrained by cost, time, or practicality, not necessarily by education.

That’s not true, because a lot of flawed design is being promoted and defended in public as the thing to do.

> Obviously a door with a handle shouldn't be a push door, I don't really think you need to write a book about it.

And yet we've all encountered push doors with handles many times.

> And the types of people creating bad design are generally constrained by cost, time, or practicality, not necessarily by education.

Good design is far cheaper and easier than bad design in the long run. Being able to articulate the benefit of good design such that stakeholders provide the resources for good design is perhaps one of the most important reasons to have such an education.

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