Review of Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
Theory of Mind Rules Everything Around Me
Everyday Things
Just this morning, I turned on the faucet to wash my hands, flipped a switch to turn on the lights, and turned a doorknob to open the door and leave my apartment. It was good that I did not have to think too hard to do these things, because I would be frustrated if I had to take even 5 extra minutes to learn how to turn on the lights, and I’m grateful that these kinds of situations for the most part rarely come up. But sometimes they still do. When I use a public restroom, it’s not always obvious how the faucet works. Am I supposed to push, turn, or wave my hands to trigger a sensor? If the lights are off, how do I turn them on? And is that door meant to be pushed or pulled? Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things explains why some things just work and others just don’t.
What the book is about
Natural mappings, useful feedback, and the intentional usage of constraints and affordances is the key to designing things that just work. Don Norman observes, like many other researchers, that in the end, humans think and behave in reliably predictable ways, and to make an object easy to use is to design it in a way that best fits these patterns of behavior by using the four principles he spells out. Don Norman then explains and puts a name to these principles and gives many examples throughout the book showing how they can be applied in different contexts. When an object is designed with these four principles in mind, learning to use the object becomes trivial because the user in a sense already knows what to do with it. A steering wheel, for example, uses natural mappings by relating the action of rotating a steering wheel left to the effect of turning a vehicle towards the left, and vice versa. It provides feedback, because the vehicle turns when the wheel is rotated, and if it doesn’t, the driver knows something is wrong. And it is usefully constrained, because a steering wheel cannot for instance be lifted up or pushed down; it can only be turned left or right. There are no instruction manuals or labels needed, because the driver already knows what to do. Even a first-time driver knows how to turn a steering wheel; they might make turns that are too sharp or too wide, but in general they know how it works
No Free Lunches
One big recurring idea that stood out to me while reading this book is just how important context is when making design decisions. There is no single correct way to design any object because tradeoffs are unavoidable. Users are only one of the many different stakeholders involved in the design process, which may involve buyers, manufacturers, and even awards committees, and what’s important to the user might not be important to the other stakeholders. Tacking more functionality onto an office printer might impress a buyer and justify higher prices, but what the buyer sees as more functionality, the end user might see as needless complexity. That some change is pitched as an upgrade is too often because of the need to drive sales, and not because the change materially improves the lives of the end user. Don Norman advocates for the user in this book, which I appreciate, but difficult choices are unavoidable even when their needs are prioritized. The shape of the holes of a pair of scissors will inevitably fit some hands better than others; make it more comfortable for right-handed users and left-handed users will suffer. The best a designer can do is to make an informed choice.