(notes on) The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

NB. These notes contribute towards my diyMBA, my attempt to learn lots without a formal MBA programme. Check out my full reading list, and why I’m doing it DIY.

In summary, this is THE book on UX design. First published in 1988, its longevity shows its quality. It’s an excellent overview of all key design principles — what design is, what it does, and why good design is vital — pairing high level concepts with practical detail. It’s lengthy and without padding so is tough to digest everything in places… but its worth the effort to go slow and stick with it.

Ultimately, the lessons in this book are applicable to far more than just Design — eg effective problem solving, customer psychology, innovation — and I’d recommend as essential reading to anyone no matter your discipline.

TLDR

Good design is essential in building a successful product. Good design is all around us in the everyday world, but we rarely see it. We only notice the Bad Design, like when we walk into a door.

Well designed products have good Discoverability, meaning we can immediately know how to use it. We are able to perform the Action required, and are able to immediately evaluate the results (was the action successful?).

Good designers combine knowledge in the world and knowledge in the users head to ensure users know what to do. Tasks are simplified, and constraints ensure the wrong action cannot be taken. If it is taken, feedback tells the user something’s gone wrong, and what to do next.

My Notes

1. The Psychopathology of Everyday Things

“Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.”

Discoverability — Can the user figure out what actions are possible and where and how to perform them?

Understanding — What does it all mean? How is the product supposed to be used? What do all the different controls and settings mean? Many products defy understanding simply because they have too many functions and controls.

Human Centred Design is an approach that puts human needs, capabilities, and behavior first, then designs to accommodate those needs, capabilities, and ways of behaving.

Good design requires good communication from machine to person, indicating what actions are possible, what is happening, and what is about to happen.

Communication is especially important when things go wrong.

Fundamental Principles of Interaction
When we interact with a product, we must figure out how to work it. This process is built on 6 key pronciples.

1. Affordances. Relationship between properties of an object and the capabilities of the user. eg a chair “affords” (is for) support, and therefore affords sitting. Affordances and anti-affordances (what it’s not for) must be perceivable.
2. Signifiers. Shows where the action should take place, eg signs, labels or drawings. Some are a perceived affordance, eg well designed door handle.
3. Mappings. The relationship between two sets of things, eg spatial layout of controls.
4. Feedback. Communicating the results of an action, eg a sound, a light, or a vibration.
5. Conceptual Models. Simplified explanation of how something works. Different users may have different mental models based on 1) how they use a product and 2) their skill level.
6. System Image. The combined information available to us that helps form our understanding of an object or system.

2. The Psychology of Everyday Actions

When people use something, they face two gulfs:

• Gulf of Execution, where they try to figure out how it operates.
• Gulf of Evaluation, where they try to figure out what happened.

We bridge the gulf using the discoverability concepts above.

Seven Stages of Action
“There are two parts to an action: executing the action and then evaluating the results: doing and interpreting.”

1. Goal (form the goal)
2. Plan (the action)
3. Specify (an action sequence)
4. Perform (the action sequence)
5. Perceive (the state of the world)
6. Interpret (the perception)
7. Compare (the outcome with the goal)

Types of behaviors:

• Goal-driven behavior: Starts at the top of the action cycle and work down.
• Event-driven behavior or data-driven behavior can start from the bottom, triggered by the environment or world. In this situation, the cycle starts in the evaluation stage first.

The seven stages provide a guideline for developing new products or services. The gulfs are obvious places to start, for either gulf, whether or execution or evaluation, is an opportunity for product enhancement.

What about radical ideas, ones that introduce new product categories to the marketplace? These come about by reconsidering the goals, and always asking what the real goal is (aka the root cause analysis).

Human Cognition and Emotion
Three levels of processing:

• Visceral level (lizard brain) — allows us to respond quickly and subconsciously, without conscious awareness or control.
• Behavioural level — Learned skills, triggered by situations that match the appropriate patterns. Every action is associated with an expectation. Feedback provides reassurance, even when it indicates a negative result. A lack of feedback creates a feeling of lack of control, which can be unsettling.
• Reflective level (conscious cognition) — where deep understanding develops, where reasoning and conscious decision-making take place. To the designer, reflection is perhaps the most important of the levels of processing.

[a version of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow]

Design takes place at all levels, with Reflection perhaps the most important. Reflection is conscious, and the emotions produced at this level are the most lasting. It is reflection that drives us to recommend a product to others, or to avoid it.

The insights from 7 stages of action lead us to 7 fundamentals of design.

1. Discoverability. It is possible to determine what actions are possible and the current state of the device?
2. Feedback. There is full and continuous information about the results of actions and the current state of the product or service. After an action has been executed, it is easy to determine the new state.
3. Conceptual model. The design projects all the information needed to create a good conceptual model of the system, leading to understanding and a feeling of control for the user.
4. Affordances. The proper affordances exist to make the desired actions possible.
5. Signifiers. Effective use of signifiers ensures discoverability and that the feedback is well communicated and intelligible.
6. Mappings. The relationship between controls and their actions follows the principles of good mapping, enhanced as much as possible through spatial layout and temporal contiguity.
7. Constraints. Providing physical, logical, semantic, and cultural constraints guides actions and eases interpretation.

3. Knowledge in the Head and in the World

To use a product, the user should not need to memorise precise knowledge of how to do so. The knowledge should be distributed — partly in the head, partly in the world, and partly in the constraints of the world.

Whenever knowledge needed to complete a task is readily available in the world, the need for the user to learn it is removed, eg a phone number in the smartphone era.

Two types of knowledge

• Declarative knowledge (of) — facts, rules
• Procedural knowledge (how) — skills (eg in music, sport)

Memory (short term and long term) allows users to use a product, though faults can arise as memories are incomplete and bias.

The most effective way of helping users is to make remembering a process unnecessary. Minimise the need for conscious reasoning through good design.

“Provide meaningful structures. Perhaps a better way is to make memory unnecessary: put the required information in the world.”

4. Knowing what to do: Constraints, Discoverability and Feedback

“Constraints are powerful clues, limiting the set of possible actions.”

Four types of constraints

• Physical, eg square peg cannot be used in a round hole
• Cultural, eg red means stop
• Semantic, eg windshields block wind from drivers face, therefore is placed in front of driver
• Logical, eg the left switch controls the left light and right switch the right light

Conventions are a special form of cultural constraint, providing guidance for novel situations. Consistency helps lessons learned in one system transfer easily to another.

Skeuomorphic is the technical term for incorporating old, familiar ideas into new technologies, even though they no longer play a functional role. This consistency helps bridge understanding from an old way to a new way of doing things. eg the phone icon on your phone.

5. Human Error? No, bad design

Human errors are design problems, not user incompetence.

“Physical limitations are well understood by designers; mental limitations are greatly misunderstood.”

Root Cause Analysis helps find the single, underlying cause of an accident.

The Five Whys: Japanese process from Toyota for getting at root causes. The goal is to keep moving the inquiry deeper. Example:

1. Why did the plane crash? Because it was in an uncontrolled dive
2. Why didn’t the pilot recover from the dive? Because the pilot failed to initiate a timely recovery
3. Why was that? Because he might have been unconscious
4. Why was that? We don’t know. Need to find out
5. Further inquiry as needed.

Two Types of Errors

• Slips occur when the goal is correct, but required actions are not completed properly. eg user performs an action wrong or forgets what to do
• Mistakes occur when the goal is wrong. eg the rules of how to use a product have changed, or a users long term memory mis-remembers what is needed.

Prevent errors by including user constraints.

6. Design Thinking

“One of my rules in consulting is simple: never solve the problem I am asked to solve…because, invariably, the problem I am asked to solve is not the real, fundamental, root problem. It is usually a symptom.”

We often rush to solve a problem without questioning whether or not we are solving the right problem.

Design thinking: Process of determining the root issues first. Once the real problem is determined, a wide range of solutions are considered. Solution to the problem is only selected after these prior steps are tackled.

“Effective design needs to satisfy a large number of constraints and concerns, including shape and form, cost and efficiency, reliability and effectiveness, understandability and usability, the pleasure of the appearance, the pride of ownership, and the joy of actual use.”

Double Diamond model of design — Find the right problem, then find the right solution.

Double Diamond Model of Design, via wikipedia

[similar to Opportunity Solution Tree by Teresa Torres or the Thoughtful Execution Framework by Spotify]

Designers often start by questioning the problem given to them… they expand the scope of the problem, diverge to examine all the fundamental underlying issues, then converge to a single problem statement.

Human Centred Design cycle

• Observation. Research to understand the nature of the problem, discovering interests, motives and true needs. Combine with Market Research.
• Idea generation. Identify potential solutions. Ignore constraints. Question everything. Upend assumptions.
• Prototyping. Create a working example to test ideas. A crude mockup or cardboard model is fine. This ensures the problem is well understood by all.
• Testing. A test group that reflects your target audience can interact, experience, and use the prototype.

…then iterate!

“The hardest part of design is getting the requirements right, which means ensuring that the right problem is being solved, as well as that the solution is appropriate. Requirements made in the abstract are invariably wrong. Requirements produced by asking people what they need are invariably wrong. Requirements are developed by watching people in their natural environment.”

Activity Focussed Design cycle
Focus on activities, not the individual person. Let the activities define the product and its structure.

Activity: A high-level structure. Example : Go shopping. An activity is comprised of multiple tasks.

Task: A lower-level component of an activity. Example: Drive to the market. Find a shopping basket. Use a shopping list. A logical grouping of tasks form an activity.

A hierarchy of tasks from Charles Carver and Michael Scheier:

Be-goals: The highest level of a person’s being, guiding why people act and are long-lasting goals.

Do-goals: The plans and actions to be performed for an activity.

Motor-goals: Specifies how actions are performed. These are at the task level (rather than activity level).

Focus on activities, not tasks, since the activity is more holistic and functions at a higher level.

“Design for individuals and the results may be wonderful for the particular people they were designed for, but a mismatch for others. Design for activities and the result will be usable by everyone”

7. Design in the World of Business

The design of technology to fit human needs and capabilities is determined by the psychology of people. Yes technologies may change, but people stay the same.

Two forms of product innovation:

Incremental innovation: Less glamorous, but more common.

Radical innovation: More glamorous, but rarely successful. Upends existing paradigms when successful.

Featuritis (aka “feature creep”): The phenomenon whereby a successful product keeps adding new features to the point that it overcomplicates a once simple, elegant, straight-forward solution.

“The best products come from ignoring these competing voices and instead focusing on the true needs of the people who use the product.”

New technologies have unlocked the creativity of everyone resulting in greater individual innovation and, as a consequence, people engaged in the act of design. Examples: self-publishing, 3D printing, videos, etc.

The End! Buy the book…

…and see my full reading list with notes on other awesome books.