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Comment by reledi | Hacker News Reader

After taking an HCI course and reading The Design of Everyday Things, I also notice poorly designed things quite often.

BTW, there's a free course based off that book starting this fall: https://www.udacity.com/course/design101.

This might not be the best place to mention this, but here goes anyway: I started reading The Design of Everyday Things, but I've been disappointed so far. To be fair, I'm only 50 pages in, but I haven't read anything mind blowing in any way yet. The book so far has been a compendium of author's anecdotes regarding poorly designed things/systems/manuals/etc. I certainly agree with what he says, absolutely. At the same time though, it doesn't keep my attention because it just seems like story after story, no logical foundation that he's building for creating a well-designed product.

Here's to hoping it gets better!

That and the Mythical Man Month were duds for me. I never understood why they were so highly regarded amongst engineers.

They aren't duds. The problem is that they are so influential that every newcomer already knows whats they say, just by virtue of learning their trade after the books were written.

TV Tropes (!) of all places has a great explanation, applied to comedy: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny

I feel the same way about Code Complete. I tried to read it but just couldn't force myself to as much of it seemed obvious. Maybe back in the day it was as amazing as people say.

Have you gotten to affordances yet? I recall that being the major "foundational" takeaway for me (i.e., affordances, via their physical form, communicate to a user what actions can, cannot, must, or must not be taken).

Remember this was written in the eighties, Norman's discourse on mental models was transformative not just within the field of IT, but the entire field of psychology. Before psychologists thought people used logic to make inferences about the world, but after Normans work it became apparent that people developed detailed mental models on how the world works.

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