The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
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(Paperback - Reprint)
- Pub. Date: August 2002
- 288pp
- Sales Rank: 15,918
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: August 2002
- Publisher: Basic Books
- Format: Paperback, 288pp
- Sales Rank: 15,918
- ISBN-13: 9780465067107
- ISBN: 0465067107
- Edition Description: Reprint
Synopsis
Donald Norman's best-selling plea for user-friendly design, with more than 175,000 copies sold to date, is now a Basic paperback."Provocative."--Time magazine
Annotation
This book is part polemic, part science, part serious and part fun. It examines the effect of poor design and equipment failure on human behavior. Intended for a general audience, it covers user-centered design, the psychopathology of everyday things and the psychology of everyday actions.
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
Donald A. Norman is Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University, a former “Apple Fellow,” and a partner in the Nielsen Norman Group Consulting Firm, which consults with corporations on design. He is the author of a number of books on design, including Emotional Design and the best-selling The Design of Everyday Things. He lives in Northbrook, Illinois and Palo Alto, California.
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Design of Everyday Thingsby Anonymous
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September 26, 2008: I wish to start by acknowledging that Donald Norman did a good job identifying flaws in other designs but interestingly failed to recognise the imperfection in his own style of presentation of texts and images in the book, which at some point made this rather classic design book difficult to read. This led me into asking if there ever is a perfect design within our human environment. However, I found an enormous amount of knowledge about the psychology needed in designing products, as a young software developer. It is a great book, and anyone involved in designing any form of product for human use should read it. After reading this book, it became clear how designers often designed products with the intention of having all users? actions with their system as precise as possible. Norman looks at the kinds of errors people make in using gadgets and discusses how designers can plan to eliminate these errors. In as much as a huge part of the book is outdated, it made me wonder why some of those very undesirable designs are still been seen around today. Perhaps Norman succeeded in making me paranoid about designs around me, but in a similar way, I hope that it reflects in the way I design my software applications. A few times in the book, Norman invited thoughts from the supposed `poor? designers cited in the book about the reason and logic behind their various designs. I suggest it would have been of much value if that was done for all the examples cited. That I believe would have created a fair representation of ideas from both Norman and the designers. Finally, my conclusion after reading Norman?s book is that, a design is not perfect until a user?s actions on that product match the designer?s intended actions.
One of my all-time favorite booksby Anonymous
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November 07, 2002: Norman argues that most "human error" is design error, that things should be as intuitively simple as possible, and that there should be safeguards against making serious errors. How reasonable! How intelligent! How rarely followed. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and I constantly find myself thinking about it, quoting it and recommending it to friends. Unfortunately, it can't be force-fed to all would-be designers, but it gives me ammunition and armor against their excuses.
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