by Don Norman
In the past, innovation happened in the industrialized nations and with time, each innovation became more powerful, more complex, often bloated with features. Older technology was given to the developing nations. The cost to the environment was seldom considered. But with the rise of the small, with new, flexible, inexpensive technologies, the power is shifting. Today, anyone in the world can create, design, and manufacture. The newly developed nations are taking advantage, designing and building by themselves, for themselves. Moreover, out of necessity they develop advanced devices that require less power, that are simpler to make, maintain, and use. They develop medical procedures that don’t require refrigeration or continual access to electric power. Instead of using handed-down technology, their results add value for all of us—call it handed-up technology.
With the rise of global interconnection, global communication, powerful design, and manufacturing methods that can be used by all, the world is rapidly changing. Design is a powerful equalizing tool: all that is needed is observation, creativity, and hard work—anyone can do it. With open-source software, inexpensive open-source 3-D printers, and even open-source education, we can transform the world.
AS THE WORLD CHANGES, WHAT STAYS THE SAME?
With massive change, a number of fundamental principles stay the same. Human beings have always been social beings. Social interaction and the ability to keep in touch with people across the world, across time, will stay with us. The design principles of this book will not change, for the principles of discoverability, of feedback, and of the power of affordances and signifiers, mapping, and conceptual models will always hold. Even fully autonomous, automatic machines will follow these principles for their interactions. Our technologies may change, but the fundamental principles of interaction are permanent.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The original edition of this book was entitled The Psychology of Everyday Things (POET). This title is a good example of the difference between academics and industry. POET was a clever, cute title, much loved by my academic friends. When Doubleday/Currency approached me about publishing the paperback version of this book, the editors also said, “But of course, the title will have to be changed.” Title changed? I was horrified. But I decided to follow my own advice and do some research on readers. I discovered that while the academic community liked the title and its cleverness, the business community did not. In fact, business often ignored the book because the title sent the wrong message. Bookstores placed the book in their psychology section (along with books on sex, love, and self-help). The final nail in the title’s coffin came when I was asked to talk to a group of senior executives of a leading manufacturing company. The person who introduced me to the audience praised the book, damned the title, and asked his colleagues to read the book despite the title.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR POET: PSYCHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY THINGS
The book was conceived and the first few drafts written in the late 1980s while I was at the Applied Psychology Unit (the APU) in Cambridge, England, a laboratory of the British Medical Research Council (the laboratory no longer exists). At the APU, I met another visiting American professor, David Rubin of Duke University, who was analyzing the recall of epic poetry. Rubin showed me that it wasn’t all in memory: much of the information was in the world, or at least in the structure of the tale, the poetics, and the lifestyles of the people.
After spending the fall and winter in Cambridge, England, at the APU, I went to Austin, Texas, for the spring and summer (yes, the opposite order from what would be predicted by thinking of the weather at these two places). In Austin, I was at the Microelectronics and Computer Consortium (MCC), where I completed the manuscript. Finally, when I returned to my home base at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), I revised the book several more times. I used it in classes and sent copies to a variety of colleagues for suggestions. I benefited greatly from my interactions at all these places: APU, MCC, and, of course, UCSD. The comments of my students and readers were invaluable, causing radical revision from the original structure.
My hosts at the APU in Britain were most gracious, especially Alan Baddeley, Phil Barnard, Thomas Green, Phil Johnson-Laird, Tony Marcel, Karalyn and Roy Patterson, Tim Shallice, and Richard Young. Peter Cook, Jonathan Grudin, and Dave Wroblewski were extremely helpful during my stay at the MCC in Texas (another institution that no longer exists). At UCSD, I especially wish to thank the students in Psychology 135 and 205: my undergraduate and graduate courses at UCSD entitled “Cognitive Engineering.”
My understanding of how we interact with the world was developed and strengthened by years of debate and interaction with a very powerful team of people at UCSD from the departments of cognitive science, psychology, anthropology, and sociology, organized by Mike Cole, who met informally once a week for several years. The primary members were Roy d’Andrade, Aaron Cicourel, Mike Cole, Bud Mehan, George Mandler, Jean Mandler, Dave Rumelhart, and me. In later years, I benefited immensely from my interactions with Jim Hollan, Edwin Hutchins, and David Kirsh, all faculty members in the department of cognitive science at UCSD.
The early manuscript for POET was dramatically enhanced by critical readings by my colleagues: In particular, I am indebted to my editor at Basic Books, Judy Greissman, who provided patient critique through several revisions of POET.
My colleagues in the design community were most helpful with their comments: Mike King, Mihai Nadin, Dan Rosenberg, and Bill Verplank. Special thanks must be given to Phil Agre, Sherman De-Forest, and Jef Raskin, all of whom read the manuscript with care and provided numerous and valuable suggestions. Collecting the illustrations became part of the fun as I traveled the world with camera in hand. Eileen Conway and Michael Norman helped collect and organize the figures and illustrations. Julie Norman helped as she does on all my books, proofing, editing, commenting, and encouraging. Eric Norman provided valuable advice, support, and photogenic feet and hands.
Finally, my colleagues at the Institute for Cognitive Science at UCSD helped throughout—in part through the wizardry of international computer mail, in part through their personal assistance to the details of the process. I single out Bill Gaver, Mike Mozer, and Dave Owen for their detailed comments, but many helped out at one time or another during the research that preceded the book and the several years of writing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR DESIGN OF EVERYDAY THINGS, REVISED EDITION
Because this new edition follows the organization and principles of the first, all the help given to me for that earlier edition applies to this one as well.
I have learned a lot in the years that have passed since the first edition of this book. For one thing, then I was an academic scholar. In the interim I have worked in several different companies. The most important experience was at Apple, where I began to appreciate how issues—budget, schedule, competitive forces, and the established base of products—that seldom concern scientists can dominate decisions in the world of business. While I was at Apple it had lost its way, but nothing is a better learning experience than a company in trouble: you have to be a fast learner.
I learned about schedules and budgets, about the competing demand of the different divisions, about the role of marketing, industrial design, and graphical, usability, and interactive design (today lumped together under the rubric of experience design). I visited numerous companies across the United States, Europe, and Asia and talked with numerous partners and customers. It was a great learning experience. I am indebted to Dave Nagel, who hired and then promoted me to vice president of advanced technology, and to John Scully, the first CEO I worked with at Apple: John had the correct vision of the future. I learned from many people, far too many to name (a quick review of the Apple people I worked closely with and who are still in my contact list reveals 240 names).
I learned about industrial design first from Bob Brunner, then from Jonathan (Joni) Ive. (Joni and I had to fight together to convince Apple management to produce his ideas. My, how Apple has ch
anged!) Joy Mountford ran the design team in advanced technology and Paulien Strijland ran the usability testing group in the product division. Tom Erickson, Harry Saddler, and Austin Henderson worked for me in the User Experience Architect’s office. Of particular significance to my increased understanding were Larry Tesler, Ike Nassi, Doug Solomon, Michael Mace, Rick LaFaivre, Guerrino De Luca, and Hugh Dubberly. Of special importance were the Apple Fellows Alan Kay, Guy Kawasaki, and Gary Starkweather. (I was originally hired as an Apple Fellow. All Fellows reported to the VP of advanced technology.) Steve Wozniak, by a peculiar quirk, was an Apple employee with me as his boss, which allowed me to spend a delightful afternoon with him. I apologize to those of you who were so helpful, but who I have not included here.
I thank my wife and critical reader, Julie Norman, for her patience in repeated careful readings of the manuscripts, telling me when I was stupid, redundant, and overly wordy. Eric Norman showed up as a young child in two of the photos of the first edition, and now, twenty-five years later, read the entire manuscript and provided cogent, valuable critiques. My assistant, Mimi Gardner, held off the e-mail onslaught, allowing me to concentrate upon writing, and of course my friends at the Nielsen Norman group provided inspiration. Thank you, Jakob.
Danny Bobrow of the Palo Alto Research Center, a frequent collaborator and coauthor of science papers for four decades, has provided continual advice and cogent critiques of my ideas. Lera Boroditsky shared her research on space and time with me, and further delighted me by leaving Stanford to take a job at the department I had founded, Cognitive Science, at UCSD.
I am of course indebted to Professor Yutaka Sayeki of the University of Tokyo for permission to use his story of how he managed the turn signals on his motorcycle. I used the story in the first edition, but disguised the name. A diligent Japanese reader figured out who it must have been, so for this edition, I asked Sayeki for permission to name him.
Professor Kun-Pyo Lee invited me to spend two months a year for three years at the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology (KAIST) in its Industrial Design department, which gave me a much deeper insight into the teaching of design, Korean technology, and the culture of Northeast Asia, plus many new friends and a permanent love for kimchi.
Alex Kotlov, watching over the entrance to the building on Market Street in San Francisco where I photographed the destination control elevators, not only allowed me to photograph them, but then turned out to have read DOET!
In the years since publication of POET/DOET, I have learned a considerable amount about the practice of design. At IDEO I am indebted to David Kelly and Tim Brown, as well as fellow IDEO Fellows Barry Katz and Kristian Simsarian. I’ve had many fruitful discussions with Ken Friedman, former dean of the faculty of design at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, as well as with my colleagues at many of the major schools of design around the world, in the United States, London, Delft, Eindhoven, Ivrea, Milan, Copenhagen, and Hong Kong.
And thanks to Sandra Dijkstra, my literary agent for almost thirty years, with POET being one of her first books, but who now has a large team of people and successful authors. Thanks, Sandy.
Andrew Haskin and Kelly Fadem, at the time students at CCA, the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, did all of the drawings in the book—a vast improvement over the ones in the first edition that I did myself.
Janaki (Mythily) Kumar, a User Experience designer at SAP, provided valuable comments on real world practices.
Thomas Kelleher (TJ), my editor at Basic Books for this revised edition, provided rapid, efficient advice and editing suggestions (which led me to yet another massive revision of the manuscript that vastly improved the book). Doug Sery served as my editor at MIT Press for the UK edition of this book (as well as for Living with Complexity). For this book, TJ did all the work and Doug provided encouragement.
GENERAL READINGS AND NOTES
In the notes below, I first provide general readings. Then, chapter by chapter, I give the specific sources used or cited in the book.
In this world of rapid access to information, you can find information about the topics discussed here by yourself. Here is an example: In Chapter 5, I discuss root cause analysis as well as the Japanese method called the Five Whys. Although my descriptions of these concepts in Chapter 5 are self-sufficient for most purposes, readers who wish to learn more can use their favorite search engine with the critical phrases in quotes.
Most of the relevant information can be found online. The problem is that the addresses (URLs) are ephemeral. Today’s locations of valuable information may no longer be at the same place tomorrow. The creaky, untrustworthy Internet, which is all we have today, may finally, thank goodness, be replaced by a superior scheme. Whatever the reason, the Internet addresses I provide may no longer work. The good news is that over the years that will pass after the publication of this book, new and improved search methods will certainly arise. It should be even easier to find more information about any of the concepts discussed in this book.
These notes provide excellent starting points. I provide critical references for the concepts discussed in the book, organized by the chapters where they were discussed. The citations serve two purposes. First, they provide credit to the originators of the ideas. Second, they serve as starting points to get a deeper understanding of the concepts. For more advanced information (as well as newer, further developments), go out and search. Enhanced search skills are important tools for success in the twenty-first century.
GENERAL READINGS
When the first edition of this book was published, the discipline of interaction design did not exist, the field of human-computer interaction was in its infancy, and most studies were done under the guise of “usability” or “user interface.” Several very different disciplines were struggling to bring clarity to this enterprise, but often with little or no interaction among the disciplines. The academic disciplines of computer science, psychology, human factors, and ergonomics all knew of one another’s existence and often worked together, but design was not included. Why not design? Note that all the disciplines just listed are in the areas of science and engineering—in other words, technology. Design was then mostly taught in schools of art or architecture as a profession rather than as a research-based academic discipline. Designers had remarkably little contact with science and engineering. This meant that although many excellent practitioners were trained, there was essentially no theory: design was learned through apprenticeship, mentorship, and experience.
Few people in the academic disciplines were aware of the existence of design as a serious enterprise, and as a result, design, and in particular, graphical, communication, and industrial design worked completely independently of the newly emerging discipline of human-computer interaction and the existing disciplines of human factors and ergonomics. Some product design was taught in departments of mechanical engineering, but again, with little interaction with design. Design was simply not an academic discipline, so there was little or no mutual awareness or collaboration. Traces of this distinction remain today, although design is more and more becoming a research-based discipline, where professors have experience in practice as well as PhDs. The boundaries are disappearing.
This peculiar history of many independent, disparate groups all working on similar issues makes it difficult to provide references that cover both the academic side of interaction and experience design, and the applied side of design. The proliferation of books, texts, and journals in human-computer interaction, experience design, and usability is huge: too large to cite. In the materials that follow, I provide a very restricted number of examples. When I originally put together a list of works I considered important, it was far too long. It fell prey to the problem described by Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (2005). So I decided to simplify by providing less. It is easy to find other works, including important ones that will be published after this book. Meanwhile, m
y apologies to my many friends whose important and useful works had to be trimmed from my list.
Industrial designer Bill Moggridge was extremely influential in establishing interaction within the design community. He played a major role in the design of the first portable computer. He was one of the three founders of IDEO, one of the world’s most influential design firms. He wrote two books of interviews with key people in the early development of the discipline: Designing Interactions (2007) and Designing Media (2010). As is typical of discussions from the discipline of design, his works focus almost entirely upon the practice of design, with little attention to the science. Barry Katz, a design professor at San Francisco’s California College of the Arts, Stanford’s d.school, and an IDEO Fellow, provides an excellent history of design practice within the community of companies in Silicon Valley, California: Ecosystem of Innovation: The History of Silicon Valley Design (2014). An excellent, extremely comprehensive history of the field of product design is provided by Bernhard Bürdek’s Design: History, Theory, and Practice of Product Design (2005). Bürdek’s book, originally published in German but with an excellent English translation, is the most comprehensive history of product design I have been able to find. I highly recommend it to those who want to understand the historical foundations.
Modern designers like to characterize their work as providing deep insight into the fundamentals of problems, going far beyond the popular conception of design as making things pretty. Designers emphasize this aspect of their profession by discussing the special way in which they approach problems, a method they have characterized as “design thinking.” A good introduction to this comes from the book Change by Design (2009), by Tim Brown and Barry Katz. Brown is CEO of IDEO and Katz an IDEO Fellow (see the previous paragraph).