The Design Of Everyday Things

Design doesn't have to complicated, which is why this guide to human-centered design shows that usability is just as important as aesthetics. Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious -- even liberating -- book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization. The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time. The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how -- and why -- some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.

Donald A. Norman, a popular design consultant to car manufacturers, computer companies, and other industrial and design outfits, has seen the future and is worried. In this long-awaited follow-up to The Design of Everyday Things, he points out what's going wrong with the wave of products just coming on the market and some that are on drawing boards everywhere-from "smart" cars and homes that seek to anticipate a user's every need, to the latest automatic navigational systems. Norman builds on this critique to offer a consumer-oriented theory of natural human-machine interaction that can be put into practice by the engineers and industrial designers of tomorrow's thinking machines. This is a consumer-oriented look at the perils and promise of the smart objects of the future, and a cautionary tale for designers of these objects-many of which are already in use or development.

Why attractive things work better and other crucial insights into human-centered design Emotions are inseparable from how we humans think, choose, and act. In Emotional Design, cognitive scientist Don Norman shows how the principles of human psychology apply to the invention and design of new technologies and products. In The Design of Everyday Things, Norman made the definitive case for human-centered design, showing that good design demanded that the user's must take precedence over a designer's aesthetic if anything, from light switches to airplanes, was going to work as the user needed. In this book, he takes his thinking several steps farther, showing that successful design must incorporate not just what users need, but must address our minds by attending to our visceral reactions, to our behavioral choices, and to the stories we want the things in our lives to tell others about ourselves. Good human-centered design isn't just about making effective tools that are straightforward to use; it's about making affective tools that mesh well with our emotions and help us express our identities and support our social lives. From roller coasters to robots, sports cars to smart phones, attractive things work better. Whether designer or consumer, user or inventor, this book is the definitive guide to making Norman's insights work for you.

Why we don't really want simplicity, and how we can learn to live with complexity. If only today's technology were simpler! It's the universal lament, but it's wrong. In this provocative and informative book, Don Norman writes that the complexity of our technology must mirror the complexity and richness of our lives. It's not complexity that's the problem, it's bad design. Bad design complicates things unnecessarily and confuses us. Good design can tame complexity. Norman gives us a crash course in the virtues of complexity. Designers have to produce things that tame complexity. But we too have to do our part: we have to take the time to learn the structure and practice the skills. This is how we mastered reading and writing, driving a car, and playing sports, and this is how we can master our complex tools. Complexity is good. Simplicity is misleading. The good life is complex, rich, and rewarding—but only if it is understandable, sensible, and meaningful.

A conceptual update of affordance theory that introduces the mechanisms and conditions framework, providing a vocabulary and critical perspective. Technological affordances mediate between the features of a technology and the outcomes of engagement with that technology. The concept of affordances, which migrated from psychology to design with Donald Norman's influential 1988 book, The Design of Everyday Things, offers a useful analytical tool in technology studies—but, Jenny Davis argues in How Artifacts Afford, it is in need of a conceptual update. Davis provides just such an update, introducing the mechanisms and conditions framework, which offers both a vocabulary and necessary critical perspective for affordance analyses. The mechanisms and conditions framework shifts the question from what objects afford to how objects afford, for whom, and under what circumstances. Davis shows that through this framework, analyses can account for the power and politics of technological artifacts. She situates the framework within a critical approach that views technology as materialized action. She explains how request, demand, encourage, discourage, refuse, and allow are mechanisms of affordance, and shows how these mechanisms take shape through variable conditions—perception, dexterity, and cultural and institutional legitimacy. Putting the framework into action, Davis identifies existing methodological approaches that complement it, including critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA), app feature analysis, and adversarial design. In today's rapidly changing sociotechnical landscape, the stakes of affordance analyses are high. Davis's mechanisms and conditions framework offers a timely theoretical reboot, providing tools for the crucial tasks of both analysis and design.

Have you ever noticed how many products appear to be designed by someone who has never used a product of that kind before? Nearly everyone has encountered websites, software apps, cars, appliances, and other products that made them wonder what the designers were thinking. The Thoughtless Design of Everyday Things presents more than 150 examples of products that violate nine fundamental design principles, along with suggestions for improving many of the flawed user interfaces and other design problems. These examples of thoughtless design reveal 70 specific lessons that designers ought to heed as they craft the user experience. This book describes numerous specific practices for enhancing product usability through usage-centered design strategies. You'll also see more than 40 products that exhibit particularly thoughtful designs, the kinds of products that surprise and delight users. Whether you're a designer, a product development manager, or a thoughtful and curious consumer, you'll find The Thoughtless Design of Everyday Things engaging, informative, and insightful.

It has been claimed that the natural sciences have abstracted for themselves a 'material world' set apart from human concerns, and social sciences, in their turn, constructed 'a world of actors devoid of things'. While a subject such as archaeology, by its very nature, takes objects into account, other disciplines, such as psychology, emphasize internal mental structures and other non-material issues. This book brings together a team of contributors from across the social sciences who have been taking 'things' more seriously to examine how people relate to objects. The contributors focus on every day objects and how these objects enter into our activities over the course of time. Using a combination of different theoretical approaches, including actor network theory, ecological psychology, cognitive linguistics and science and technology studies, the book argues against the standard notion of objects and their properties as inert and meaningless and argues for the need to understand the relations between people and objects in terms of process and change.