54 pages • 1 hour read
Donald NormanThe Design of Everyday Things
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Human-Centered Design (HCD) Versus Traditional Design
Human-centered design (HCD), also called user-centered design, differs from traditional design in several respects and its promotion is the main theme of Norman’s work. In contrast to traditional design, which stresses logic, HCD is a design philosophy that puts human needs, capabilities, and behaviors at the fore of the design process.
Norman argues that good design requires understanding psychology and adapting technology to human behaviors, rather than forcing people to change their behaviors to match machines. Good design facilitates communication between people and technology with affordances, signifiers, constraints, mappings, feedback, and conceptual models. According to Norman, good design is necessarily user-focused: “Quality only comes about by continual focus on, and attention to, the people who matter: customers” (264, emphasis added). Only through an iterative process of observation, testing, and adaptation can designers create user-friendly products.
Traditional design focuses not on users, but on the competition. Norman argues that focusing on what competitors are doing leads to excess. He compares the outcome to an illness, “an insidious disease called ‘featuritis’, with its main symptom being creeping featurism” (258). Companies add new features to their products to emulate their competitors regardless of whether or not it makes sense to do so. Norman claims that featuritis is “highly infectious” (262), with new products invariably becoming more complex and more powerful than earlier models.
The tendency to add new features to a product to match the competition’s offerings negatively impacts users, who are left with expensive, unwieldy products loaded with features they do not use. Creeping featurism extends the number of features beyond reason. As Norman notes, “There is no way that a product can remain usable and understandable by the time it has all of those special-purpose features that have been added in over time” (262).
Studies show that yielding to competitive pressures by copying other products blurs the line between brands (263). A better strategy is for companies to focus on areas in which they already excel, strengthen these areas, and ignore irrelevant weaknesses. Marketing campaigns emphasizing the strengths of products are key to their success. Norman sums up his recommendations as follows: “Don’t follow blindly; focus on strengths, not weaknesses. If the product has real strengths, it can afford to just be ‘good enough’ in the other areas” (263).
Traditional design is linear, whereas HCD is circular. The linear process progresses step-by-step in a single direction, in contrast to the circular method, which allows for backtracking to clarify ideas, hone specifications, and refine prototypes. Although Norman favors HCD, he stresses the utility of both methods: the iterative model is better suited for the early design stages, while the linear method is best for later stages.
The Importance of Failure and Errors
One of Norman’s key recommendations in The Design of Everyday Things is to replace the word “failure” with “learning experience.” Failure not only affords an opportunity to understand why things went wrong, but also provides information about how to improve.
People tend to blame themselves when they fail, leading to feelings of guilt and helplessness. Repeated failure can result in a psychological phenomenon called “learned helplessness,” whereby people stop trying to complete the task in question (as well as similar tasks). Just as people learn to give up after multiple failures, however, they can also learn from positive experiences. It is with this in mind that Norman asks readers to reconceptualize their understanding of failure. Instead of seeing failure in negative terms, he casts it in a positive light: “When something doesn’t work, it can be considered an interesting challenge, or perhaps just a positive learning experience” (64).
To err is to be human. Good design compensates by creating products with this in mind. Norman seeks to replace the notion of human error with ideas of communication and interaction. For him, good design facilitates communication and interaction between humans and machines. Designers must create products that behave in ways that are understandable to people using the fundamental design principles, rather than forcing people to adapt to the demands of products. Good design not only anticipates errors, but also works well even when users perform the wrong actions. Good design must also guide users when things go wrong, instead of simply providing error messages. Finally, good design must be flexible and accommodate variations in user commands.
Good design requires identifying the correct problem and reaching the correct solution, an iterative process that depends on repeated failure. Indeed, failure has become so central to user-centric design that firms take pride in the failures that occur during the development phase. As Norman puts it, “failure teaches [designers] a lot about what to do right” (64). Norman believes so strongly in the merits of failure as an essential facet of exploration and creativity that he recommends failure to students and employees as the path to innovation: “If designers and researchers do not sometimes fail, it is a sign that they are not trying hard enough—they are not thinking the great creative thoughts that will provide breakthroughs in how we do things.” (64). Failure is therefore both an inherent and beneficial part of the design process.
Bridging Theory and Practice in HCD
Norman writes, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is” (236). This joke describes the gulf between the HCD process (theory) and designing in the real world (practice). According to Norman, bridging this gulf is the principal challenge of designers. Norman lays out a four-step user-centered design process for product development, providing a “how-to” guide for designers. This process consists of four activities: observation (or design research), ideation, prototyping, and testing. Norman emphasizes that the design process is iterative in nature. Simply put, it requires constant backtracking and refinement at all stages of development, with each cycle producing more insights that ultimately lead to the correct solution.
The iterative design process puts designers at odds with product managers, who are tasked with producing products on time and on budget. Product managers seek quick solutions to problems. By contrast, when using the Double Diamond model of design, designers engage in a process called “design thinking.” That is, their point of departure is to expand the problem to ensure that they solve the correct problem: “Good designers never start by trying to solve the problem given to them: they start by trying to understand what the real issues are” (218).
Design is by nature interdisciplinary. Creating a product requires managers, designers, engineers, manufacturers, packagers, marketers, and salespeople. Each field is essential to creating a product that people buy, use, and enjoy. Conflicting goals, however, can lead to strife among team members: “Each of the separate disciplines has a different view of the product, each has different but specific requirements to be met. Often the requirements posed by each discipline are contradictory or incompatible with those of the other disciplines” (238). To reduce conflict, Norman recommends including a member from every discipline in all stages of the design process. He also stresses the importance of compromise.
Designers must strive to follow the principles of good design, while also attending to the constraints placed upon them by other team members. Production costs, deadlines, patents, marketability, and product price are just a few non-design issues that impact designers. Design is complex. The only way the process works is if the relevant team members work harmoniously. For Norman, balancing the different agendas while creating a good product is the ultimate challenge for designers.
