The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition

The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition [Kindle Edition]

Author: Don Norman | Language: English | ISBN: B00E257T6C | Format: PDF, EPUB

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The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition
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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.

In this entertaining and insightful analysis, cognitive scientist Donald A. Norman hails excellence of design as the most important key to regaining the competitive edge in influencing consumer behavior. Now fully expanded and updated, with a new introduction by the author, The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how—and why—some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.

Books with free ebook downloads available The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition

• File Size: 1862 KB
• Print Length: 370 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; Revised Edition edition (November 5, 2013)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B00E257T6C
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray:
  Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #13,760 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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  • #4 in Books > Business & Money > Industries & Professions > Retailing
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Finally I got a chance to read this amazing book. Don Norman treats design very methodically and shows that good design is not a black box but something even more analytical people can understand and apply.
There are many important lessons but I found the concepts of discoverability, affordance, signifiers, feedbacks, mappings and constraints a simple, yet a powerful model to understand design.
I am not a designer by a far stretch but I can now appreciate good vs bad design with a deeper understanding of the designer's intent in building something. Even of design is not your field, you will greatly benefit from the book and you will realize that design is not just a touchy feely topic.

Although, I would have to say that for a design book, the images are not printed very well (in the paper back edition). And the during introducing the core concepts, in the first chapter, the author forgot to include 'constraints'. Also the order of these terms keep changing though out the book. This does not align well with the mapping concept the author so strongly professes.

However, now that this edition is out, don't get the previous version, since this one has far more relevant examples including hand held devices. As an additional resource, there is also a design course on udacity offered by Don Norman.

By Smiling Buddha

The good:

All three stars I'm giving this are for the content. Norman's insights and principles are worthwhile and very useful. I don't agree with all of them, but most of them seem sound and the ones that don't still bring up good points to discuss.

The bad:

I wish an editor could convince him to cut this book in half. It's obvious that Norman is a academic and has been for a long time. He has that thing, that ivory tower myopia that comes off as pompous and self congratulatory. I had a really hard time wading through his never ending stories in the service of simple points. GET TO THE POINT, MAN. He also uses psychological terms that are terrible to try and parse (associative activation error? Are you kidding me? How about we call that the "ring ring, come in" error, so maybe people can remember it.) It's surprising that a book about design is so poorly designed on so many levels. Part of that is because this edition is an Amazon print on demand, and the layout sucks. Good lessons in here about how NOT to layout text. Part of it is also up to Norman, though. He likes using italics, I think as asides or illustrations of a point, but it's not consistent, and really just why, man? Why do that? Accept the cultural constraints of typography.

tl;dr

My advice is to read the last chapter, which is a nice succinct roundup of all the main points. If you want more information on any topic, look back through the book.

By Arthur F Black

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