Please click to listen if you cannot see the player below: The Design Of Everday Things

 

Hello everyone, my name is Elif Topsakal. Welcome to my book review podcast. The book that I reviewed is THE DESIGN of EVERYDAY THINGS by Donald Arthur Norman.

The author is an academician in the field of cognitive science, design and usability engineering. He also serves on company board of directors and advisory board for the Nielsen Norman Group. His work involves the advocacy of user-centered design. His books all have the underlying purpose of furthering the field of design, from doors to computers. Norman is an active Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science&Technology. He also holds the title of Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego.

He decided to write this book because of his experiences with everyday objects. As he studied psychology and watched the behavior of other people, he realized that he is not the only one having problems with everyday objects. He notes that we generally blame ourselves for not figuring out how a device works. However, the problem is most probably with the design of the device. He gives the famous American power plan disaster at Three Mile Island as an example. The disaster was declared as ‘human error’, however, the disaster was because of not available tools to solve the problem and because of the problems with available tools. The author describes that his book is an effort to change the way some devices are designed; the devices that cause frustration, cannot be understood and lead to errors.

The chapter one provides the important principles of design. One of them is visibility. It means that the correct parts of the device must be visible and must convey the correct message. Other important principle is mapping between what you want to do and what appears to be possible. Affordance, which is another design principle, refers to how a thing could possibly be used. Another principle described by the author is mapping which is the relationship between the controls and their movements and the results in the world. Natural mapping is when we take advantage of physical analogies and cultural standards, leads to immediate understanding. Another important principle described is feedback. Feedback is sending back to the user information about what action has actually been done, what results has been accomplished.

In chapter two, the author explains how people do things and explains seven stages of action: forming the goal, forming the intention, specifying an action, executing the action, perceiving the state of the world, interpreting the state of the world, evaluating the outcome. These actions can be used as valuable design aids since it provides a basic checklist.

In chapter three, the author discusses that the information is not always stored in the head. It is also stored in the world. For example, while everyone can recognize a penny when seen, many cannot describe it in details. The knowledge can be distributed in the head, partly in the world, and partly in the constraints of the world.  He also examines how people use their memories and how they retrieve information and categorizes his findings and then discusses the trades of relying on information in the World versus in the heads.

In chapter four, author discusses how we can tell what to do when we encounter a novel object. He tries to answer the question of how design can signal the appropriate actions. The designer should leverage the constraints to limit what can be done with the object and use the affordance of objects.

In chapter five, the author describes the types of errors a person can make. Then he describes how design can prevent errors and if errors do occur, how design can detect and correct them.

In chapter six, the author explores the challenges for designers. He discusses how and why designers make mistakes and describes the computer of future. I found this description pretty interesting because what he describes is like an iPad with improved SIRI capabilities that is introduced lately by Apple.

In the last chapter, the author describes the principles or transforming difficult tasks into simple ones. He suggests that the designer should first use both knowledge in the world and in the hand. They should also simplify the structure of tasks, make things visible and got the mappings right. They should also exploit the power of constraints and design for errors. Finally, they should standardize if everything else fails. The author concludes the book asking the reader to look everyday things with the insight gained reading this book and invites them to appreciate the good design and be aware of the bad design.

Even though some examples in the book are dated because the book was originally published in 1988, the examples are still relevant. I noticed that some descriptions were unnecessarily repeated several times throughout the book. The book could be more concise and shorter which would make it more readable. Nevertheless, I give four stars to this book because it made me realize the importance of design. It thought me we must consider the audience while we are designing. For example, when we design a course, we must consider our students.

Thanks for listening my podcast.

For more information about the author, see the links below;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Norman
http://www.jnd.org/bio-sketch.html