The Book The Design of Everyday Things, Was written by Donald Norman. Norman has a background in Cognitive Science, Usability Engineering and Design, so clearly is more focused on the functionality and user friendliness of design. He has a strong view on the way things should work when it comes to design.
His book focuses on the actions of using everyday objects, and the common misconceptions of what good and bad design is. He believes that all design should be very easy to use and blatant simply from its appearance.
Focusing on the chapter Psychology of Everyday Actions, He talks a lot about how we think about the things we use, and how we react when something doesn’t work. He uses example where even the simplest of everyday tasks can be failed by users and people seem to blame themselves and not the design. People tend to compare their failure to the success of others at the same task, resulting in the user believing they have failed. When in reality it is bad design, and important to question the design and how successful it is. “If we believe that others are able to use the device and we believe that is not very complex, then we conclude that any difficulties must be our own fault” (Norman, 1988) . Norman focuses heavily on the idea of blame, when something doesn’t do its job properly or someone can’t easily use it. Who’s fault is it the users or the designers? He explains the psychology behind failing at such everyday activities and why it is we tend to blame ourselves. He uses many examples of everyday failures that are really a design flaw rather than misuse of the object. For example he explains that on a keyboard where the Enter and Return key are in similar places and can often be confused, the wrong key resulting in loss of work. He explains that people often blame themselves for such a mistake, when it could actually be a flaw in design. With such examples he is trying to show us a new way of thinking about design and everyday objects, and to get us to stop blaming ourselves for something that should have been designed to be easy to use. This would result in more efficient designs that avoid such errors in function.
Many of his examples are successful in backing up his points and provoking thought into the idea of blame, however as the book was published in 1988 some of the examples are somewhat irrelevant to the everyday we live in today. One of his examples is an old VCR player, sure we can understand what he is trying to say but using more modern examples what help relate better to the everyday we live in.
Norman does a good job of making readers think more about the functionality of design and how important user friendliness is, as it is commonly forgotten that everyday objects are designed for everyday people and should be simple for everyone to use. He challenges this idea of blame in bad design and explains to readers that not being able to use something that should normally be a simple everyday object, comes down to it being a bad design. Not the user being flawed.
Reference:
Donald A. Norman (1988). The Design Of Everyday Things:
The Psychology Of Everyday Actions (pg 34-53)
