The Design of Everyday Things

by Donald A. Norman,

The book is written about how the design of everyday things should be done and the existing issues with current designs as of 20 years ago. The author mainly focuses on the simplification of devices and the need to have their functions follow more natural mappings. Such things as stoves should not require you to have to think about which nob to turn in order to turn the correct burner on. He also describes designs that are so straight forward that you don't need anything except to have the knob for the correct burner to be in the natural location for that burner i.e. the knobs should not be in a row on top of the stove unless the burners are arranged in that way. Another example that he talks about is the fashion in which sinks are designed and how there are many natural mappings that can be applied to their design but due to the desire for creativeness and elegance there is no set standard in faucet designs. This causes many headaches for everyday users that must determine how to use each faucet they come to in their busy lives because there is not standard with which they can rely on.

One of the things you will notice when reading the book is that the author repeats points over an over again which is good to drive those points home but causes readers like me to find the book very repetitive. This also makes is seem almost like he is ranting about a small set of things instead of describing a very wide spread problem at the time he wrote the book.

Moving past his slight ranting I really enjoyed the part of the book devoted to human memory and how we handle situations and the way in which we explain them to ourselves. After reading this book and reflecting I find that I do the same kinds of things on a regular basis and always have to remember that upon new information I might have to rethink they way I think things work such as an air conditioning thermostat or a fridgerator as he describes in the book.

Overall I think it was a good read that will help me keep in mind the problems faced by designers today and the need to devote as much time as possible to making a product or application as user friendly and straight forward as possible to help users be able to take full advantage of the designs with out the lack of use of features that the author describes so much.