The Design of Everyday Things

Donald A. Norman

I am not the remote controller in my household.

The reason is a bit embarrassing—I can’t figure out how to use the damn thing. (This is only a slight exaggeration; my wife can confirm this.)

I’ve always been a little ashamed of this inability—until I read Donald A. Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. And I forgave myself a little. Norman allowed me to reframe my struggle with remote controls, because I now had someone other than me to blame: designers.

I’ll let Norman elaborate:

Well-designed objects are easy to interpret and understand. They contain visible clues to their operation. Poorly designed objects can be difficult and frustrating to use. They provide no clues—or sometimes false clues. They trap the user and thwart the normal process of interpretation and understanding. Alas, poor design predominates.

When Norman talks about “design,” he uses a broader sense of the term than how we use the term in the A/E/C industry. The “things” in the book title is to be taken literally—he is literally referring to the things that populate our everyday life. Yes, this includes the design of “things” in our industry—those aforementioned vestibules—but it also encompasses the broader field of all person-made objects: scissors, stovetops, car radios.

One reason I loved this book is the humor: much of the book is one amusing anecdote after another about bad design—people trapped in vestibules, unable to place calls on hold, or relying on pages of self-written instructions to operate a stereo system.

But Norman’s aim is more than compiling humorous examples of bad design: he wants to help the reader understand why design is so hard. 

The book functions as a handy guide to several of the complex challenges faced by designers. Those include understanding how humans think about action, considering how knowledge can live outside of our own heads, and—my favorite section of the book—outlining the various categories of errors that people make.

My journey through this book left me humbled—by the difficulty of design, the power of great design, and the frustrating (but sometimes charming!) fallibility of us humans.