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Book: The Design of Everyday Things
Quotes of Book: The Design of Everyday Things
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  1. Donald A. Norman _ The Design of Everyday Things

    The mind is more difficult to comprehend than actions. Most of us start by believing we already understand both human behavior and the human mind. After all, we are all human: we have all lived with ourselves all of our lives, and we like to think we understand ourselves. But the truth is, we don't. Most of human behavior is a result of subconscious processes. We are unaware of them. As a result, many of our beliefs about how people behave-including beliefs about ourselves-are wrong. That is why we have the multiple social and behavioral sciences, with a good dash of mathematics, economics, computer science, information science, and neuroscience.
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  2. Donald A. Norman _ The Design of Everyday Things

    Our strengths are in our flexibility and creativity, in coming up with solutions to novel problems. We are creative and imaginative, not mechanical and precise. Machines require precision and accuracy; people don't. And we are particularly bad at providing precise and accurate inputs. So why are we always required to do so? Why do we put the requirements of machines above those of people?
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  3. Donald A. Norman _ The Design of Everyday Things

    To the designer, reflection is perhaps the most important of the levels of processing. Reflection is conscious, and the emotions produced at this level are the most protracted: those that assign agency and cause, such as guilt and blame or praise and pride. Reflective responses are part of our memory of events. Memories last far longer than the immediate experience or the period of usage, which are the domains of the visceral and behavioral levels. It is reflection that drives us to recommend a product, to recommend that others use it-or perhaps to avoid it.
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  4. Donald A. Norman _ The Design of Everyday Things

    Getting the specification of the thing to be defined is one of the most difficult parts of the design, so much so that the HCD principle is to avoid specifying the problem as long as possible but instead to iterate upon repeated approximations. This is done through rapid tests of ideas, and after each test modifying the approach and the problem definition. The results can be products that truly meet the needs of people. Doing HCD within the rigid time, budget, and other constraints of industry can be a challenge: Chapter 6 examines these issues.
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  5. Donald A. Norman _ The Design of Everyday Things

    The debate is not useful. All groups are necessary. Customer research is a tradeoff: deep insights on real needs from a tiny set of people, versus broad, reliable purchasing data from a wide range and large number of people. We need both. Designers understand what people really need. Marketing understands what people actually buy. These are not the same things, which is why both approaches are required: marketing and design researchers should work together in complementary teams."
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  6. Donald A. Norman _ The Design of Everyday Things

    First, most accidents do not have a single cause: there are usually multiple things that went wrong, multiple events that, had any one of them not occurred, would have prevented the accident.
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  7. Donald A. Norman _ The Design of Everyday Things

    Most industrial accidents are caused by human error: estimates range between 75 and 95 percent. How is it that so many people are so incompetent? Answer: They aren't. It's a design problem.
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  8. Donald A. Norman _ The Design of Everyday Things

    Consistency in design is virtuous. It means that lessons learned with one system transfer readily to others. On the whole, consistency is to be followed. If a new way of doing things is only slightly better than the old, it is better to be consistent. But if there is to be a change, everybody has to change. Mixed systems are confusing to everyone. When a new way of doing things is vastly superior to another, then the merits of change outweigh the difficulty of change. Just because something is different does not mean it is bad. If we only kept to the old, we could never improve.
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  9. Donald A. Norman _ The Design of Everyday Things

    When a bridge collapses, we analyze the incident to find the causes of the collapse and reformulate the design rules to ensure that form of accident will never happen again. When we discover that electronic equipment is malfunctioning because it is responding to unavoidable electrical noise, we redesign the circuits to be more tolerant of the noise. But when an accident is thought to be caused by people, we blame them and then continue to do things just as we have always done.
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  10. Donald A. Norman _ The Design of Everyday Things

    When many people all have the same problem, shouldn't another cause be found? If the system lets you make the error, it is badly designed. And if the system induces you to make the error, then it is really badly designed.
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  11. Donald A. Norman _ The Design of Everyday Things

    Customer research is a tradeoff: deep insights on real needs from a tiny set of people, versus broad, reliable purchasing data from a wide range and large number of people. We need both. Designers understand what people really need. Marketing understands what people actually buy. These are not the same things, which is why both approaches are required: marketing and design researchers should work together in complementary teams.
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  12. Donald A. Norman _ The Design of Everyday Things

    Design is concerned with how things work, how they are controlled, and the nature of the interaction between people and technology. When done well, the results are brilliant, pleasurable products. When done badly, the products are unusable, leading to great frustration and irritation. Or they might be usable, but force us to behave the way the product wishes rather than as we wish.
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