Design of Everyday Things - Norman, Don [5]
Many people write to ask whether the lessons of DOET also apply to computers and other digital and wireless devices. At first I was surprised at these questions—of course they do; wasn’t the answer obvious?
Question: In your book The Design of Everyday Things, you talk about the design of everything from telephones to doorknobs consisting of essentially four elements: affordance, constraint, mapping, and feedback. You weren’t talking about computers, but do you think the book also applies to them?
Answer: I was absolutely talking about computers. I deliberately didn’t use computers and other digital devices as examples because I wanted to show that the very same principles that applied to the design of doorknobs and light switches also applied to computers, digital cameras, cell phones, nuclear power control rooms, and aircraft—and, of course, vice versa.
Question: Do you believe that designers of the latest technological devices address those elements?
Answer: Nope. Each time a new technology comes along, new designers make the same horrible mistakes as their predecessors. Technologists are not noted for learning from the errors of the past. They look forward, not behind, so they repeat the same problems over and over again. Today’s wireless devices are appalling. The principles in DOET are highly relevant.
We went through this with websites—the early designs ignored all that had been learned before and set us back many years in progress toward usability and understanding. But eventually, as people became more experienced, they started to demand better websites, so things improved. As each new technology matures, customers are no longer happy with the flashy promises of the technology but instead demand understandable and workable designs. Slowly the manufacturers relearn the same basic principles and apply them to their products. The most egregious failures always come from the developers of the most recent technologies.
One goal of DOET is to illustrate the power of design. If DOET does nothing else, it should show you how to take delight in good designs and to take umbrage at mediocre, thoughtless, inappropriate ones.
Technology may change rapidly, but people change slowly. The principles, the examples, and the lessons of The Design of Everyday Things come from an understanding of people. They remain true forever.
DON NORMAN
Northbrook, Illinois
www.jnd.org
PREFACE
This is the book I have always wanted to write, but I didn’t know it. Over the years I have fumbled my way through life, walking into doors, failing to figure out water faucets, incompetent at working the simple things of everyday life. “Just me,” I would mumble. “Just my mechanical ineptitude.” But as I studied psychology and watched the behavior of other people, I began to realize that I was not alone. My difficulties were mirrored by the problems of others. And we all seemed to blame ourselves. Could the whole world be mechanically incompetent?
The truth emerged slowly. My research activities led me to the study of human error and industrial accidents. Humans, I discovered, do not always behave clumsily. Humans do not always err. But they do when the things they use are badly conceived and designed. Nonetheless, we still see human error blamed for all that befalls society. Does a commercial airliner crash? “Pilot error,” say the reports. Does a Soviet nuclear power plant have a serious problem? “Human error,” says the newspaper. Do two ships at sea collide? “Human error” is the official cause. But careful analysis of these kinds of