The design of everyday things
by Gabriel Motta FerreiraIn his book, Donald Norman brings essential insights about product design that can serve as guidance for designers in many other fields. He was one of the first to see design as a user-oriented discipline. Thus, a good design should be minimal, as simple as possible. It should feel natural, as if there was no design intended.
Once we start to see design through his eyes, we understand how in 1988 and still today designers fail to understand their mission. Most of the times, they don’t reflect enough time on user’s experience when interacting with an object (or with anything else). We have goals, and is the designers’ task to facilitate them through visual clues.
The book focuses on the user when relating to design, and that’s why it is still nowadays a very important piece of literature and a must-read for every designer.
One situation that many time goes unnoticed pointed out by Norman is the fact that usually when a product is badly designed (e.g. bad mapping, no visibility about key features, etc), people tend to think is their fault that they have problems interacting with the object. Nevertheless, most of the times it is not. I started to pay attention in myself and noticed that in my daily life I used to blame me for not being able to deal with a badly designed product. Norman talks about the importance of a natural design: signs in our visibility so we can understand how objects work.
He goes further and argues that the big majority of objects around us have a poor design. They don’t facilitate users understanding about what actions they should do in order to achieve their goals. Even worst, they many times mislead users by giving wrong impressions or delayed/fallacious feedback.
Norman understands that we are humans, consequently we make mistakes. No one is free of taking wrong actions and making errors. But for him a good design should minimize these mistakes and also minimize their damages.
“With proper design, human mistakes can be less common”
Besides criticizing many poor designs with which I could highly relate to (specially computer projectors that manage to be a problem to every student and teacher everyday in our school), he also offers some solutions that encourage better designs. He talks, for instance, about the principles of design for understandability and usability: provide a good conceptual model and making important things visible in the product. Conceptual models are important because they allow us to predict the consequences of our actions.
An important factor for Donald Norman is that usability and aesthetics should always go together. Many designers put aesthetics before usability, opting for a good looking solutions rather than more convenient ones for users. Nevertheless, aesthetics should not sacrifice usability which in his words “can be designed in from the first conceptualization of the product”.
In addition to this, designers have to take into consideration the two types of knowledge people have: in the real world and in their heads. When designing something, decisions are made because we assume that on the other side (user), there will be someone that will understand the object in a similar way we do. People have their own specific “cultural backpack” they gained in their lives, knowledge we all carry and influence in our decisions when dealing with products.
Therefore, designers have to think about this knowledge but also in the knowledge or information their product offers users in the real world. This is why it is very impressive to see small children, almost babies, playing with iPads. Even though they don’t have any background knowledge related to dealing with such technology, they can easily interact with their fingers and find their way around even better than their parents do. It shows how well-designed the product is, by simplifying a complex computer into something easy to use even for a three years’ old.
Finally, Norman brings it up that a good design is not about the product, but about its users. It is all about people. Thus, a key factor for any design is understanding human behavior. And how to do that? By when creating something, thinking at the same time user’s journey when the product will be ready. By making tests and understanding what parts should be changed. By thinking on how to facilitate the visibility of important affordances, on how to minimize errors and on all kinds of situations people can be when dealing with the final result of a product.
What can I take out from this book to my future?
I believe it was an extremely useful book for all of us. Even though I am a Crossmedia Production student, and not Human Computer Interaction one, I could relate to our work as well and think on many cases I could use concepts from “The design of everyday things”.
In our field, thinking user experience together with story development/ content production is a must. When working with different media platforms, we have to be aware of what kind of user they will have, what knowledge about how to interact with these platforms they possess, what are the trends that we should respect, how to map features in a meaningful manner, etc. Although a bit more freely than designers, we have the duty to think in the final users and how they will feel like when consuming our projects. And once we have done that, we have to go and see their reaction when dealing with our products.
In conclusion, it was a really nice book that taught me a lot. It definitely will assist me when designing our entertainment media experiences but also made me pay attention to several daily objects and how I interact with them. By giving a huge amount of good and bad (mostly bad) design examples, Norman opened my eyes for how important design is, and how present it is in our lives.
