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Donald A. Norman

The Design of Everyday Things Paperback – February 1, 1990

by Donald Norman (Author)

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Print length

272 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Doubleday Business
Publication date

February 1, 1990
Dimensions

5.25 x 1 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10

0385267746
ISBN-13

978-0385267748
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Anyone who designs anything to be used by humans--from physical objects to computer programs to conceptual tools--must read this book, and it is an equally tremendous read for anyone who has to use anything created by another human. It could forever change how you experience and interact with your physical surroundings, open your eyes to the perversity of bad design and the desirability of good design, and raise your expectations about how things should be designed.

Review

"This book is a joy -- fun and of the utmost importance." -- Tom Peters. -- Review

...makes a strong case for the needlessness of badly conceived and badly designed everyday objects...[T]his book may herald the beginning of a change in user habits and expectations, a change that manufacturers would be obliged to respond to. Button pushers of the world, unite. -- Los Angeles Times

Publisher : Doubleday Business (February 1, 1990)
Language : English
Paperback : 272 pages
ISBN-10 : 0385267746
ISBN-13 : 978-0385267748
Item Weight : 9.6 ounces
Dimensions : 5.25 x 1 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,192,335 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #501 in Industrial Design (Books)
- #1,271 in Marketing & Consumer Behavior
- #1,551 in Environmental Engineering (Books)

Customer Reviews:
818 ratings

Customer reviews

5 star		69%
4 star		16%
3 star		7%
2 star		4%
1 star		4%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Sarah Heinzelwein

Essential reading for any designer of any kind

Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2017

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This is essential and timeless reading for any designer. It's tough to get through, ironically because it's a book about usability and accessibility in design and it's just oceans upon oceans of text. But Donald Norman is brilliant and the ideas are sound. Consider that the original book was written long before the internet and that the revised edition in the late 90's or early 00's hadn't really gone out of date. The principles are still completely relevant and not dependent on fads or changing technology. If you are an artist, industrial designer, graphic designer, tech industry professional, or just a curious human, read this book. Don't let the Norman door hit you on the way out. (What does that even mean? Well, read the book and find out!)

7 people found this helpful

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Brian K. Yoder

You Must Read This Book!

Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2017

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This is a MUST READ book for anybody in design, software, or pretty much any creative endeavor. It elegantly extracts the principles from sometimes complex environments and presents them in the most simple environments possible from doorknobs to light switches. I have all of the software engineers who work for me read this at some point.

One person found this helpful

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Sunshine

I really do like the way the author explained his ideas

Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2017

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I purchased this book for a course I am currently taking. I really do like the way the author explained his ideas. I gave 4 stars because I felt that some of the examples are antiquated and might not be recognized by younger students. Still, the important part is that the narrative is not obtuse.

One person found this helpful

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John F

Very Revealing - A great read if you build anything from software to houses.

Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2009

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This was a quick, but very fascinating read about the way people interact with the objects and devices that they encounter in their environment. This is a must read for anyone who designs just about anything and wants it to be useful rather than just elegant or attractive. I'd especially recommend it to software developers, hardware developers, and residential/commercial architects.

A word of caution, however. This book will open your eyes to just how badly the things around you have been designed, and finally put explanations why some things are so frustrating to work with. When you see how only a little bit of forethought in usability design could have improved your experience in dealing with doors, car dashboards, coffee pots, etc. it will make you a tad cranky about such issues for a few days after reading it.

2 people found this helpful

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B. Klockars

Ironic: Great Book - Bad Binding

Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2008

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Without question, a wonderful piece of work! (I've given a dozen copies to students as inspiration.)
However, the publisher's stinginess in neither providing adequate gutter margins (between pages) nor adequately accommodating for the thickness of the book by adjustment of type placement on the page is a perfect illustration of the very design failures under discussion.
The type has to be read curved & distorted over the waves of too thick pages rushing toward the spine. Oddly, more than adequate margins have been provided on the outer edges of each page - presumably for annotation. As such, the publisher might include a note in each succeeding edition suggesting how well this exemplifies the issue. That way there would be no need to fix the problem. I might even suggest the coinage of an near-eponymous term for this: "Normandizing".

One person found this helpful

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James Monaco

Do not continue with life until reading!

Reviewed in the United States on September 22, 2006

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This update to "The Psychology of everyday things" is quite possibly my favorite book. Let me start with the negatives, as I can think of so few: I will admit that at times Donald Norman draws out his points to the extent that one wonders if he needed to meet a word count for a particular section. And some of the concepts are outdated (notably the magical 5-7 range; psychologists have put that one out to pasture).

The positives: The book is light, funny, and easy to read despite the college-student-deterring length. Norman presents all of his points with anecdotes; he relies on both real stories (personal and recounted) and hypothetical situations to lead the reader into a think-tank state of mind about how we use and are used by the designs all around us. I really liked how no subject is too trivial to be overlooked for its design lessons--examples range from shower tap handles to keyboard layouts to fire safety mechanisms to automobile dashboards...The list is stunningly long.

I think the most pleasant aspect of this book is that it is so very usable. Sure, the examples vary enough to resemble a near stream of consciousness, but it's that very diversity that causes the reader to walk away more observant of the world around him or herself. After reading this book, I am convinced that you will have a significantly altered perspective on the cognitively constructed nature of the world around you. And while some examples and concepts might show their age, the points Norman makes are simply too valuable to ignore. As a minimum, all Microsoft Windows developers should be locked in a room with this one until they finish ;)

I highly recommend it, and no, you may not buy my copy used!

3 people found this helpful

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Pepito Sbazzeguti

Clear, informative and a great guide.

Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2013

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I was expecting a book that provided general guidelines on how to design, but once I started reading I realized that it explains in detail the different aspects that influence the way we interact with the world and with the objects around us (such as how memory works and how we learn from the environment).
The main message I got out of it is that a good design should serve men and allow us to use that object in the most natural and "human" and intuitive way without having to look at a manual!
I also learned a lot about psychology; I know I will go back to this book from time to time.

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Top reviews from other countries

Douglas F.

Good but let down by technical language and poor photos

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 27, 2020

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This book is a classic in its field but ... The picture quality throughout his printing is terrible, the photos are small, low resolution and in black and white so you really have to peer at them to understand what is being shown / discussed. Not great for a book about design. Whilst this updated version has lots of new content it uses fairly technical language and isn’t a book that you just flow through it feels more like an effort to read it. It’s a good book but one you must want to read

3 people found this helpful

Daniel J. Staple

Nobody in design, engineering or development should miss this book!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 1, 2014

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I highly recommend reading this to avoid daft and lasting mistakes - the book has a damning phrase "he probably won an award for that". It talks about how to design things that are actually usable and useful, how "aesthetic" design mistakes can ruin the way stuff works, or confuse users, and at worst be dangerous. Told with examples and anecdotes, this book should be a must read for anyone involved in any product design aspect - be it hardware design, software design, development and engineering.

13 people found this helpful

Maarten de Vries

I can understand why it's a "must read" for designers

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 30, 2010

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This book is obviously about design and everyday things, like doors, taps and electr(on)ic equipment, but it's also about psychology and not so everyday things, like museums, aircraft and nuclear power plants etc. If you're only mildly interested in these topics, then this book might be a bit "heavy" for you, but if you're really interested in them, it's a classic, that is on the mandatory reading list of many design schools. Personally, I originally wanted to be a car designer, so I really enjoyed it! In fact, from now on, I think I will remember this book, every time I encounter things that are designed very well, or very badly!

Basically, the book is an almost emotional plea for design, based on usability, as opposed to aesthetics (the statement "it probably won a design prize" is not a compliment in this book!) and cost (of materials, manufacturing etc). These factors are also important, but they matter more to the manufacturers and the (often corporate) customers of the product, than the ultimate user, and what's the *use* of a product that the user doesn't know how to use?

Designing for usability is probably more complex than you think, even for something as small and seemingly simple as a ballpoint pen. We could overcome this complexity if we could learn from our mistakes, but the multiple forces of a competitive market often prevent this process of evolutionary design. As a result, the same mistakes get made over and over again, and new ones are constantly added too, often on the back of new technologies, which are actually supposed to make our lives easier! Norman calls this "the paradox of technology".

To overcome this, Norman proposes "seven principles for transforming difficult tasks into simple ones":

1. "Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head." The design of the object should help the user to form a good "conceptual model" or "mental map" of how it works, preferably without instruction labels (if it needs them, it's probably not designed very well) or the user manual, because most users don't read them anyway. A great example of an often misunderstood object is the thermostat. Many people don't understand that this is a simple on/off switch with a single speed. If they want to heat up a room asap, they turn the thermostat to the maximum temperature, but this doesn't make it go any faster. On the contrary, you risk overheating the room and having to cool it down again!
2. "Simplify the structure of tasks." Don't rely on the user to remember too many things at once, because our memory is limited.
3. "Make things visible: bridge the gulfs of Execution and Evaluation." Make it obvious which actions the user can/should take, and provide feedback when he/she has taken that action.
4. "Get the mappings right." The left switch is for the left light, the right switch is for the right one.
5. "Exploit the power of constraints, both natural and artificial." If you don't want people to insert the battery the wrong way, then make sure it doesn't fit that way. This is a physical constraint, but there are also semantic, cultural and logical ones.
6. "Design for error." Errors are not bad, they are normal! Design things in such a way that trivial errors are easily reversed ("undo") and serious errors are avoided in the first place.
7. "When all else fails, standardize." Think of the round clock-face, the QWERTY keyboard, turn a screw clockwise to tighten it etc.

The other thing I found really interesting was the relationship between usability and aesthetics. On one hand, something that looks very complicated probably isn't very easy to use, but on the other hand, "easy looking is not necessarily easy to use (...) We found that to make something easy to use, match the number of controls to the number of functions and organize the panels according to function. To make something look like it is easy, minimize the number of controls. How can these conflicting requirements be met simultaneously? Hide the controls not being used at the moment. By using a panel on which only the relevant controls are visible, you minimize the appearance of complexity. By having a separate control for each function, you minimize the complexity of use. It is possible to eat your cake and have it, too." This is one of the things Bang & Olufsen does very well, for example, and Normal actually uses an example of B&O in the book.

In summary, I can understand why this is a "must read" for designers, even though it was originally published back in 1988, because the seven principles are basically timeless. My only "buts" are:

1. I think the book could have been structured more clearly, which is of course ironic, considering it's a book about design and it actually includes a discussion about the structuring of writing material! I sometimes got a little bit "lost" in the text and I would have preferred to see the seven principles in the table of contents. A bit dull maybe, but very usable ;o)

2. I would love to see Norman apply his principles to some of the new technologies that have appeared and gone mainsteam between then and now. I've just found his follow-up book, called The Design of Future Things , but I'm not sure that's quite what I had in mind ;o)

Your comments are welcome!

19 people found this helpful

Captain Klunge

A classic reference work

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 24, 2017

Verified Purchase

A classic reference work for anyone involved in creating and marketing new or improved products. It's especially relevant for interactive designers and user experience (UX) architects.

5 people found this helpful

W. Reilly

Common Sense Design - all too uncommon

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 9, 2012

Verified Purchase

This is my first time reading this book. And I have to say I am really enjoying it. It is obviously based on the authors most loved interest. Norman shows that he is an ordinary person who gets frustrated with (bad) design in the same way we all do. But then he sets about trying to help us create guidelines for better or even great design. This book is not about clean lines and hidden details. It's about obvious usability and making life easier.

The book is technically old in the sense that he refers to old tech/computers/phone systems that were common for the time of writing. Which as we know Tech moves on kind of fast. But you have to stop yourself from saying "this is so out of date". Because really the principles are timeless. Good design will always be based on how well the design fits its purpose.

So if you have an interest in design and particularly the design of things you rely on everyday. Or if you will be responsible for the design of everyday things. This is the book to get your ideas and thinking focused on the user.

5 people found this helpful

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