Key Takeaways From The Design of Everyday Things book by Don Norman
Here are a few quotes and key takeaways from The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.
You might be interested in this book if you work in software or design, but it's also useful if you're just interested in understanding the world better.
The ideas about design apply to everything we do.
“All artificial things are designed. Whether it is the layout of furniture in a room, the paths through a garden or forest, or the intricacies of an electronic device, some person or group of people had to decide upon the layout, operations, and mechanisms.”
“Not all designed things involve physical structures. Services, lectures, rules and procedures, and the organizational structures of businesses and governments do not have physical mechanisms, but their rules of operation have to be designed.”
I picked up this book to help me learn more about software development and design in tech, but these ideas can be applied to anything that humans make. Thinking about design can help you see and appreciate the deeper layers of complexity in apparently simple objects.
Good design = function + usability
“Design presents a fascinating interplay of technology and psychology, [and] designers must understand both.”
“Good design requires good communication, especially from machine to person, indicating what actions are possible, what is happening, and what is about to happen.”
It’s one thing to make something that works. It's another to make it also easy to use. Design is about knowing both how something works technically and how humans will try to understand and interact with it.
When something goes wrong, don’t blame the user. Blame the design.
“We design equipment that requires people to be fully alert and attentive for hours, or to remember archaic, confusing procedures even if they are only used infrequently, sometimes only once in a lifetime… Then we wonder why there is failure.”
“Don’t criticize unless you can do better.”
When something fails, the onus should be on the design, not the user. This was a big shift in people's thinking about design, and it is largely thanks to Don Norman and this book.
Success comes from seeing what the real problem is.
“In the real world, the problems do not come in nice, neat packages. They have to be discovered. It is all too easy to see only the surface problems and never dig deeper to address the real issues.”
“Requirements made in the abstract are invariably wrong. Requirements produced by asking people what they need are invariably wrong. Requirements are developed by watching people in their natural environment.”
In the book, Norman describes an exercise he does with his university class where he gives the students a problem and asks them to solve it. After they present their solution, he asks them, "How do you know you solved the correct problem?"
Understanding what the real problem is is the difference between finding something that works and something that only addresses a symptom.
Question the obvious.
“I am particularly fond of ‘stupid’ questions. A stupid question asks about things so fundamental that everyone assumes the answer is obvious. But when the question is taken seriously, it often turns out to be profound: the obvious often is not obvious at all. What we assume to be obvious is simply the way things have always been done, but now that it is questioned, we don’t actually know the reasons.”
Asking the right questions is essential to getting at the heart of things. But we don't know what the right questions are until we ask them. No question should be out of bounds.
Failure is a good experience.
“Failures are to be encouraged—actually, they shouldn’t be called failures: they should be thought of as learning experiences. If everything works perfectly, little is learned. Learning occurs when there are difficulties.”
I had a professor in my first year who gave us assignments knowing we were not fully prepared and that we would struggle. A lot of us were upset at first (including me). He told us afterwards that struggle was good because if you struggle with something on your own then chances are you are going to remember it better and learn from it more.
You learn more from struggle and failure than you do from success.
We're okay with mistakes made in conversation all the time.
“Consider a conversation between two people. Are errors made? Yes, but they are not treated as such. If a person says something that is not understandable, we ask for clarification. If a person says something that we believe to be false, we question and debate… We ask for more information and engage in mutual dialogue to reach an understanding. In normal conversations between two friends, misstatements are taken as normal, as approximations to what was really meant. Grammatical errors, self-corrections, and restarted phrases are ignored. In fact, they are usually not even detected because we concentrate upon the intended meaning, not the surface features.”
I enjoyed this section on understanding errors that uses conversation as an illustration. The type of conversation he describes here is a good reminder of how healthy and enjoyable conversations can take place.
There is a big difference between hindsight and foresight.
“Hindsight makes events seem obvious and predictable. Foresight is difficult. During an incident, there are never clear clues. Many things are happening at once: workload is high, emotions and stress levels are high. Many things that are happening will turn out to be irrelevant. Things that appear irrelevant will turn out to be critical. The accident investigators, working with hindsight, knowing what really happened, will focus on the relevant information and ignore the irrelevant. But at the time the events were happening, the operators did not have the information that allowed them to distinguish one from the other.”
This section comes from a chapter in the book about investigating errors and understanding how they occur. I found this quote interesting not only in its relation to design, but also for what it says about the way we investigate and understand current or historical events.
Those are some of the key things I took away from the book. If you liked them, I recommend you read the whole thing. Whether you work in software or tech, or you just want to have a better understanding of how people make things.