The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman: chapters 1–2 summary
In the first chapter, The Psychopathology of Everyday Things, Don Norman defines several fundamental concepts that include discoverability, understanding, interaction design, experience design, human-centered design, and interaction design principles.
Norman first distinguishes that good design must include discoverability and understanding. Discoverability is the ability to recognize what actions can be taken on a given system. For instance, if a user visits Amazon.com, they can determine all they can do on the site. Understanding is the understanding of what the product can do. Therefore, if someone who never visited Amazon.com before could they perceive that it is a shopping website? Testing the technology for these two principles is critical for the success of product design.
Next, Norman makes a distinction between interaction design and experience design. Interaction design is most concerned with how humans interact with technology. How displays imply action, and response to those actions is of importance. Interaction borrows from psychology and emotions to create engaging experiences. Whereas experience design focuses on the overall quality of the experiences of products, services, and processes.
Another important principle that Norman outline in his first chapter is human-centered design. This is the underlying framework for any interaction and experience design. At its core, human needs, behaviors, and motivations are the guide to design. Through observation, good design meets human needs. Defining these needs, however, can be the most challenging part of the job as people are sometimes unaware of the difficulties they face.
The most noteworthy part of the chapter is the introduction to the principles of interaction design: affordances, signifiers, mapping, feedback, and conceptual models. Affordances, the most difficult and misused concept that Norman introduces to the world of design, is the relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of a person to understand how the object should work. For example, a doorknob affords the ability to turn and open a door. Signifiers are descriptors that explain what action can be taken on an object. For instance, the words “click here” on a user interface button, communicates to the user that the button is actionable. Mapping relates to the relationship between two sets of objects. For instance, on most cars today one can adjust the seat by pushing a set of button and good mapping have two buttons (that look like a car seat when viewed together), one vertical for back adjustment and one horizontal for the seat adjustment. Feedback is the response given by an action taken on a system and to be effective it must be immediate. For example, receiving a message on the screen confirming that your email was sent. A conceptual model is a useful and simple explanation of how something works. The best example is the file system that is found on personal computers. It visually explains that is an organization system to store documents. This understanding comes from people’s “mental model” of how a filling system works.
The following chapter, The Psychology of Everyday Actions, focuses on the seven stages of action, cognition, and emotion.
Norman starts the chapter by describing how good design needs to bridge the gap between the gulf of execution and evaluation. The gulf of execution is where people try to figure how a system should work and the gulf of evaluation is where people try to understand what happened in that interaction. The gap is bridged by the implementation of the principle of interaction design outlined in chapter one.
This leads people to organize their goals and examine what actions can be taken to achieve these goals. In the pursuit of their goals, people will plan, specify, and perform their actions. After which, they will evaluate these actions in three steps: perceiving, interpreting, and comparing. This is what Norman calls the seven stages of action. Many of these steps happen subconsciously and only if there is a disruption to normal activity that conscious attention is given. Furthermore, by doing a root cause analysis and asking “why” designers can understand people’s ultimate goals.
Norman also explains that cognition and emotion are linked together in this chapter, as cognition gives us understanding and emotion-value-judgment. There are three levels of processing working together: visceral, behavior, and reflective. The visceral level is the place where humans make quick judgments allowing them to respond quickly and subconsciously. The behavior level is where our learned skills exist and at this level, we are aware of our actions, but not the details. The reflective level is where reasoning and conscious decision-making takes place and where the highest levels of emotion come from.
The seven stages of action are highly influenced by the three levels of processing, and it is when people achieve a state of “flow” (described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) that they are fully immersed in an activity and lose track of time and their surroundings. For “flow” to be achieved, the activity cannot be too hard nor too easy.
The last section of the chapter, Norman, describes how humans assign self-blame when a failure occurs and develop a sense of helplessness. Furthermore, he advises designers on how to help people feel positive and have success with technology. For instance, Norman suggests that designers give guidance and information to users instead of error messages, and when feedback is given allow the users to act from that very point in the experience. He closes the chapter by arguing that human error is really system error. Therefore, designers should consider what happens when things go wrong, and help steer users back to safety.
