The Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 7, a new addition to Norman’s book, focuses on external constraints to design. Costs, competition, and schedules are at odds with HCD, necessitating compromises. However, radical and incremental product innovation remains possible, despite these constraints.

Competitive Forces

Global competition forces corporations to prioritize price, features, quality, and speed. As Norman observes, these pressures are at odds with the iterative design process, which is by nature time-consuming. Companies that take too long to develop a product risk being scooped by other companies. When this happens to small companies, they must alter their product to avoid competing with wealthier rivals. Even established companies, however, operate with time and budgetary constraints. Indeed, most products have a maximum development cycle of two years, with new models entering development even before the preceding model has been released.

Many companies try to please customers and remain competitive by adding new features to their products, resulting in increasingly complex and powerful products. Creeping featurism, however, can make products unusable or hard to understand.

Competition drives many companies to copy competitors. However, research suggests that companies should focus on what they do well, rather than adding features that emulate those of their rivals (263). Good designers can bracket out competitive pressures to ensure that their products are understandable, coherent, and consistent, but to do so, they must have the support of company leadership.