The Design of Everyday Things

The Design of Everyday Things, originally published in 1988 under the title The Psychology of Everyday Things, is a work of nonfiction by Donald A. Norman, an American scholar specializing in design, engineering, usability, and cognitive science. Combining psychological research, cases studies, and anecdotes, Norman argues that design mediates between objects and users, with successful design being both human-centered and multidisciplinary. A bestseller in the United States, the book remains a foundational text in the field of user-centric design.

This guide uses the 2013 revised edition published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books Group.

Summary

The Design of Everyday Things comprises seven chapters, each subdivided into several sections. Chapter 1, “The Psychopathology of Everyday Things,” describes five foundational concepts for Human Centered Design (HCD), namely, affordances, signifiers, constraints, mappings, and feedback, which operate in tandem with conceptual models to facilitate human and product interaction. Although technology has the power to simplify life and make it more enjoyable, increasingly complex technology can make products difficult to use and lead to user frustration. Norman challenges designers to cooperate with other disciplines to create user-friendly, reliable products that get delivered on time and on budget.

Chapter 2, “The Psychology of Everyday Actions,” delves into human psychology to understand how people behave and evaluate their actions. While people often blame themselves for their failures when using products, Norman stresses that the problem lies not with the people using products, but with bad design. Good design must bridge the gulfs of execution and evaluation by using the seven design principles: discoverability, feedback, a strong conceptual model, affordances, signifiers, mappings, and constraints. Identifying deficient designs is easy, but devising alternatives presents many challenges.

Chapter 3, “Knowledge in the Head and in the World,” addresses the gap between what people know through memory (“knowledge in the head”) and explicit design cues that help people use products (“knowledge in the world”), arguing that good design bridges this gap. People rarely need an in-depth understanding of how products work. A general understanding suffices if users have enough internal and external knowledge, some of which is culturally specific. Good design supports the partnership between humans and technology, which is stronger than humans and technology individually.

Chapter 4, “Knowing What to Do: Constraints, Discoverability, and Feedback,” focuses on the use of constraints in good designs. Designers draw on several tools to guide user behavior, combining cultural, logical, and semantic constraints with easy-to-discover design cues (or physical constraints) that tell users how to use products. Providing users with timely feedback, either visual or aural, is key to guiding user experience and helping users recover from incorrect actions. 

Chapter 5, “Human Error? No, Bad Design,” stresses that bad design causes accidents, not human error. Norman argues that seeking the root causes of errors and redesigning products and systems based on this information is the only way to avoid repeat disasters. Good design must prioritize human behavior by compensating for inattention and interruptions. Further, it must allow users to detect and correct errors quickly to minimize harm. Designers must create products with people in mind, rather than forcing people to adapt to machines.

Chapter 6, “Design Thinking”—a new addition to the revised and expanded edition—describes how to create successful designs. The Double Diamond design model is an expansive, iterative approach to problem-solving that allows designers to identify root problems and set out human-centered solutions. Successful designs demand repeated cycles of observation, ideation, prototyping, and testing, with each cycle yielding new insights that allow designers to refine their products. However, external constraints imposed on designers, such as budgetary and time constraints, create a gap between design theory and practice, a theme that recurs throughout the book. The challenge for designers is to create good products while also balancing the needs of various parties such as clients, product managers, engineers, and sales teams. HCD always keeps users in mind, as the central goal is to enrich people’s lives. 

Chapter 7, “Design in the World of Business,” focuses on external constraints to design. This new addition to the book presents competition as a constraint to the iterative HCD process, since it prioritizes cost and speed. New products take months to develop, but years to produce and accept. Most innovations never reach the public, and even excellent products can fail. Despite these challenges, designers have a moral responsibility to create products that people buy, use, and enjoy. Technology develops rapidly, but humans are slow to change, thereby explaining the continued relevance of HCD.