The Design of Everyday Things

Key Takeaways

Don Norman’s argument is that the friction we feel with everyday objects is almost never our fault — it’s a design failure, and good design starts by treating people as they actually are.

• Design for people as they are, not as you wish they were. Norman’s core indictment of the engineering mindset: “You are designing for people the way you would like them to be, not for the way they really are.” Direct, unmediated Observation of real users in their natural environment is irreplaceable — “There is no substitute for direct observation of and interaction with the people who will be using the product.”
• Human-Centered Design defers the problem and iterates. The HCD principle is “to avoid specifying the problem as long as possible but instead to iterate upon repeated approximations” — solutions emerge from cycles, not from a fixed up-front spec.
• Error is a property of the system, not the person. “If the system lets you make the error, it is badly designed. And if the system induces you to make the error, then it is really badly designed.” The blame the world hands users is misplaced.
• Bad design teaches helplessness. Norman’s “taught helplessness” — a designed cousin of Learned Helplessness — is how repeated small failures with everyday objects (and badly built math courses) generalize into a phobia of all technology. The fault was engineered in.
• Reframe Failure as a learning experience. “We need to remove the word failure from our vocabulary, replacing it instead with learning experience. To fail is to learn.” And the obverse for makers: “If designers and researchers do not sometimes fail, it is a sign that they are not trying hard enough.”
• Protect early ideas; criticize only with a better one. Two ideation rules: “Avoid criticizing ideas… even crazy ideas, often obviously wrong, can contain creative insights” — and the sharper version, “Never criticize unless you have a better solution.”

Connections

• User-Centered Design — Norman is the figure who popularized Human-Centered Design; this book is where the “defer the problem, iterate on approximations” discipline is laid out.
• Learned Helplessness — Norman’s “taught helplessness” is the designed-in counterpart: bad everyday objects condition people to blame themselves and give up.
• Failure — joins the cross-corpus thread (Khosla, Schwarzman) of failure as instructive input; Norman wants the word itself replaced with “learning experience.”
• Recommended by Powell’s — Kyle picked this up on a Powell’s recommendation (per his 2017 in books writeup).

Highlights

• The problem with the way engineers design vs. designers— “You are designing for people the way you would like them to be, not for the way they really are.”
• “The Human Centered Design (HCD) principle is to avoid specifying the problem as long as possible but instead to iterate upon repeated approximations.”
• “Do common technology and mathematics phobias result from a kind of learned helplessness? Could a few instances of failure in what appear to be straightforward situations generalize to every technological object, every mathematics problem? Perhaps. In fact, the design of everyday things (and the design of mathematics courses) seems almost guaranteed to cause this. We could call this phenomenon taught helplessness.”
• “We need to remove the word failure from our vocabulary, replacing it instead with learning experience. To fail is to learn: we learn more from our failures than from our successes.”
• “If designers and researchers do not sometimes fail, it is a sign that they are not trying hard enough.”
• “Never criticize unless you have a better solution.”
• “If the system lets you make the error, it is badly designed. And if the system induces you to make the error, then it is really badly designed.”
• “One of its most critical techniques is to observe the would-be customers in their natural environment, in their normal lives, wherever the product or service being designed will actually be used.”
• “There is no substitute for direct observation of and interaction with the people who will be using the product.”
• “Avoid criticizing ideas, whether your own or those of others. Even crazy ideas, often obviously wrong, can contain creative insights that can later be extracted and put to good use in the final idea selection. Avoid premature dismissal of ideas.”