Design of Everyday Things, Dan Norman
# Summary and Analysis of The Psychology of Everyday Things
by Donald Norman
Analysis by Kamika Lawrence
Summary
The Psychology of Everyday Things uses several everyday life examples to show design problems. He discusses problems where people have new technologies yet cannot use all of the features. He defines several terms and gives scenarios that relate to those terms.
The visibility of an object is good when the correct parts are visible and they convey the correct message. Well designed objects should be easy to interpret and understand. They should have visible clues to help with operation. Visibility indicates the mapping between intended actions and actual operations. The visibility of the effects of an action are also important. A user should get some feedback after completing an action. He tells the following stories to show his point:
He discusses a set of doors in a post office in a European city that neither gave any indication whether one should push or pull on the doors nor was it intuitive which side of the door one should push on. Unfortunately, his friend was stuck between the doors until he saw someone else go through the corridor.
He discusses the new phone system at Basic Books that seemed to be disliked by everyone. Everyone complained there was not a "hold" function. There was a similar function but noone could figure out how to use it. The new phone system had poor instructions. It failed to relate the new functions to the similarly named functions that people already knew about and there was no visibility (no red button to light up when someone was on hold) of the system.
The affordance of an object are its perceived and actual properties. Affordance primarily is concerned with the fundamental properties of an object that determine how it could be used. Affordances give clues of operation to the user. For example buttons should be pushed and knobs should be turned. Simple things should not require any explanations. The design has failed when simple things need labels, pictures, or instructions.
People often form a conceptual model of a device and mentally simulate its operation. Conceptual models allow us to predict the effects of an action. This can only be done when the parts are visible and the implications are clear. People get clues to how things work by their constraints, mappings and affordances. He gives examples to support this: a pair of scissors and a three wheeled bike. The scissors has holes. The holes are used as affordances (you need to put something in the holes.) The size of the holes is a constraint so that a limited number of fingers could fit in them. The mapping (possible actions) between the holes and the fingers is suggested by the holes. The bike obviously would not work by looking at the two sets of handle bars connected to the same wheel.
The operation of an object becomes unclear when there is a false conceptual model for the system. The refridgerator / freezer temperature control device showed this. The manufacturer's conceptual model gave the impression that there were two controls for the temperature of the freezer and the refridegerator. However, this was not true and made setting the temperature impossible.
Norton continues to discuss the need of visibility with another phone system example. The telephone system would allow the user to keep dialing a busy number until the call could go through. If this process took several hours the phone could ring and both people could answer the phone asking who's calling with the belief that the other person placed the call. The phone did not look complicated but it was still unusable. The mappings for the functions were arbitrary. Part of the problem was also due to vestigial features while designing the faceplate for the phone. Vestigial features are features in a new version of a product that existed in a previous version of the product. As long as the unintuitive features of the phone had not gotten any complaints, the features were never eliminated, and the interfaces for simple things become more complex.
Good mappings and and natural relationships between the controls and the things controlled make functionality easier to lear and use. Norman discusses a car system that has over a hundred functions but is much easier to learn then the aforementioned phone system because the user's expectations, the necessary actions and the results are meaningful. The placement of the controls were related to their function and the number of controls was almost at a one-to-one mapping with the number of functions.
Mapping is refers to the relationship of two things. Natural mappings refer to cultural standards or physical analogies. These lead to immediate understanding. For example, the length of a line could indicate a volume of music. As the volume is increased incrementally, the line should increase incrementally.
Feedback sending back the user information about what action has actuall has been done. Norman gives another telephone example to show his point. When telephones were first invented the user would push a button and get hear a tone. When the call was being connected the phone made noised so the user would know what was happening. Problems with modern telephone systems occur because there are more features and less feedback.
Unfortunately, it takes about five or six times to get a product right. If a design for an object is bad it can be considered a failure after the second or third time. After this the idea is usually dead and potentially good products are not developed further. The design of technology usually follows a U curve. At first the product is difficult to understand. The complexity is decreased to a comfortable level. Then more features are added and the complexity rises again. The same technology whose functionality makes life easier, makes life more diffuculty by making the object harder to use and learn. This is the paradox of technology. Although the added complexity and difficulty can not be avoided when functions are added, but this should be minimized with a good design. It should not be an excuse for a poor design.
Interesting Points
* He mentions that if consumers continue to buy poorly designed products, manufacturers will think they are doing a good job.
If all all the products to perform a necessary task are poorly designed how should users try to perform the task?
* Most ofthe examples he gives of systems are problematic because of a lack of user testing. Did any of the companies start user testing after seeing thelack of satisfaction or did noone complain?
Things I Liked
I really like all of the practical examples. I have encountered just about all of the systems that he said were problematic.
Problems With the Paper
* He uses some key terms like mapping and feedback in some of the stories in the beginning of the chapter but doesn't really define them until later.
* In the telephone scenario where he describes the calls being forwarded constanly, he makes it seem like that was a problem with the interface but the problem seems to be system based to me.
Review/Main points of Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things :
1) Most human error is, in actuality, design error
2) Good design must be a fundamental part of design from the start
3) Good design cannot be adopted once a product has been completed
4) Technology must provide function unnoticed, without disruption
5) Good design makes people happy to be seen using it
6) Good design makes products seem to work better, even if they don't
Reviews :
*....His first rule is ÔÇÿDesign for usabilityÔÇÖ. Usability, or ease of use, is paramount. DonÔÇÖt make navigation difficult. Make things visible ÔÇô donÔÇÖt keep the user in the dark. A good example of how this goes wrong in e-learning is the poor use of icons in navigation. Programmes sometimes have graphics that look like icons but are not active, merely illustrative. You click on them and nothing happens. Even worse, you may click on an icon and something unexpected happens. The icon may even be meaningless. In practice, icons may have to be supported by text, even if it does upset the Art Director.
Mapping is another of his principles in design. To steer a car you turn the wheel to the right to go right and left to go left. This is mapping. Apply this to navigation on the screen. To go forward the arrow should face to the right and left to go back.
#. Another Review
.. Donald A. Norman, a professor of computer science, psychology and cognitive science at Northwestern University and Stanford University, examines in this book the design of everyday things from a cognitive-psychological perspective. The book was originally published as ÔÇ£The Psychology of Everyday ThingsÔÇØ. Later, the paperback issue was called ÔÇ£The Design of Everyday ThingsÔÇØ ÔÇô allegedly because the book was placed in the psychology sections of libraries and was therefore ignored by designers.
Norman starts the first chapter with amusing anecdotes about unusable everyday objects ÔÇô doors, refrigerators, telephones, VCRs, car radios. He argues that these objects are unusable due to bad design rather than because of incompetent users. Mostly the lack of affordances is the crux of the matter. The term ÔÇ£affordanceÔÇØ refers to the perceived properties of a thing. For instance a door handle should signal whether the door has to be pushed or pulled.
In chapter two the author derives four universal design principles from the deficiencies of badly designed objects based on a psychological seven-stage model of action. Visibility: the user can tell the state of a device and possible actions by looking at it, a good conceptual model: the designer provides a coherent and consistent system image, good mappings: it is easy to determine the relationships between actions and results, and feedback: the user receives continuous feedback about the state of the system.
Chapters three and four deal with the usersÔÇÖ memory load and ways to reduce it: natural mappings and physical, semantic, cultural and logical constraints. An example of bad design is an array of switches that all look the same. The user has to remember the function of each switch. Of course, labelling the switches would help and is indeed very common, but if a door handle requires a label, it is most likely designed poorly.
Errors are discussed in chapter five. Norman explores the types of errors, where errors occur, and how they can be prevented. The next best thing to preventing errors is providing an undo function and reducing the severity of errors. After all, to err is human.
Chapters six and seven finally show why good design is so hard to achieve and consequently provide advice on how to design properly. Designer often have better technical skills than the users. Hence, they are not aware of possible usability flaws. Engineers are no better. They tend to add more and more features to their devices. The proposed solution is user-centred design. Features are useless as long as they are unusable. Therefore the design process needs to focus on the user, on his skills, on his intentions, on his environment. ÔÇ£When all else fails, standardizeÔÇØ is another piece of advice. Sometimes there are no natural mappings, sometimes it is difficult to visualise the current state of a device, and sometimes it is impossible to convey a conceptual model. Yes, designing everyday things is a difficult task, but that is no excuse for not trying hard.
Although the book is primarily about object design, its findings apply to websites and software interfaces as well. Norman is an exceptionally gifted story-teller. It is a pleasure to follow his thoughts. Even abstract concepts are marvellously exemplified. More advanced readers find over thirty pages of annotations, references to background literature and suggested readings. This book is a must-read for researchers and practitioners alike in the fields of usability and design.
# Another Review
In Chapter 1, "The Psychopathology of Everyday Things," Norman promotes visibility as "one of the most important principles of design" (4). Designers should adhere to what he calls "natural design." If a door is intended to be pushed, "the designer must provide signals that naturally indicate where to push." Excessive visibility, however, is a detriment to usability, for it interfers with "the mapping between intended actions and actual operations." Norman argues that "just the right things have to be visible; to indicate what parts operate and how...." Modern devices like VCRs, audio sets (and, I might add, computer interfaces) too often are ridden with gadgets and features that intimidate the user because of their excessive visibility. Instead, visibility, appropriate cues, and feedback for users' actions should constitute, according to Norman, the "psychology of everyday things." A designer must understand not only the psychology of human beings but also the psychology of "how things work" (12).
For Norman, good design is predicated on a mapping between the user's mental model and the designer's design or conceptual model.
The user's model is the mental model developed through interaction with the system. The system image results from the physical structure that has been built (including documentation, instructions, and labels). The designer expects the user's model to be identical to the design model. But the designer doesn't talk directly with the user -- all communication takes place through the system image. If the system image does not make the design model clear and consistent, then the user will end up with the wrong mental model. (16)
Norman uses a compelling example of the automobile as design where the user's mental model and the designer's conceptual model are optimally mapped. If the car demonstrates good design, it is because "things are visible" and the driver is the happy recipient of "natural relationships" between controls and what is controlled. The driver can understand the car's system where "single controls often have single functions" and "the relationships among the user's intentions, the required actions, and the results are sensible, nonarbitrary, and meaningful" (22).
The bottom line is customer satisfaction rather than customer frustration. If the design of modern telephone systems fares less well than that of the automobile, Norman argues it is because they "have more features and less feedback," thus making them more difficult to learn and use" (27).
Norman presents the book's title as a "lesson in design," a lesson that focuses on understanding user needs and usability testing with actual users. If designers trust only their instincts, they will run the risk of user error, user frustration, and even low user morale.
The contents of The Design of Everyday Things include the following chapters:
1. The Psychopathology of Everyday Things
2. The Psychology of Everyday Actions
3. Knowledge in the Head and in the World
4. Knowing What to Do
5. To Err Is Human
# Summary and Analysis of The Psychology of Everyday Things
by Donald Norman
Analysis by Kamika Lawrence
Summary
The Psychology of Everyday Things uses several everyday life examples to show design problems. He discusses problems where people have new technologies yet cannot use all of the features. He defines several terms and gives scenarios that relate to those terms.
The visibility of an object is good when the correct parts are visible and they convey the correct message. Well designed objects should be easy to interpret and understand. They should have visible clues to help with operation. Visibility indicates the mapping between intended actions and actual operations. The visibility of the effects of an action are also important. A user should get some feedback after completing an action. He tells the following stories to show his point:
He discusses a set of doors in a post office in a European city that neither gave any indication whether one should push or pull on the doors nor was it intuitive which side of the door one should push on. Unfortunately, his friend was stuck between the doors until he saw someone else go through the corridor.
He discusses the new phone system at Basic Books that seemed to be disliked by everyone. Everyone complained there was not a "hold" function. There was a similar function but noone could figure out how to use it. The new phone system had poor instructions. It failed to relate the new functions to the similarly named functions that people already knew about and there was no visibility (no red button to light up when someone was on hold) of the system.
The affordance of an object are its perceived and actual properties. Affordance primarily is concerned with the fundamental properties of an object that determine how it could be used. Affordances give clues of operation to the user. For example buttons should be pushed and knobs should be turned. Simple things should not require any explanations. The design has failed when simple things need labels, pictures, or instructions.
People often form a conceptual model of a device and mentally simulate its operation. Conceptual models allow us to predict the effects of an action. This can only be done when the parts are visible and the implications are clear. People get clues to how things work by their constraints, mappings and affordances. He gives examples to support this: a pair of scissors and a three wheeled bike. The scissors has holes. The holes are used as affordances (you need to put something in the holes.) The size of the holes is a constraint so that a limited number of fingers could fit in them. The mapping (possible actions) between the holes and the fingers is suggested by the holes. The bike obviously would not work by looking at the two sets of handle bars connected to the same wheel.
The operation of an object becomes unclear when there is a false conceptual model for the system. The refridgerator / freezer temperature control device showed this. The manufacturer's conceptual model gave the impression that there were two controls for the temperature of the freezer and the refridegerator. However, this was not true and made setting the temperature impossible.
Norton continues to discuss the need of visibility with another phone system example. The telephone system would allow the user to keep dialing a busy number until the call could go through. If this process took several hours the phone could ring and both people could answer the phone asking who's calling with the belief that the other person placed the call. The phone did not look complicated but it was still unusable. The mappings for the functions were arbitrary. Part of the problem was also due to vestigial features while designing the faceplate for the phone. Vestigial features are features in a new version of a product that existed in a previous version of the product. As long as the unintuitive features of the phone had not gotten any complaints, the features were never eliminated, and the interfaces for simple things become more complex.
Good mappings and and natural relationships between the controls and the things controlled make functionality easier to lear and use. Norman discusses a car system that has over a hundred functions but is much easier to learn then the aforementioned phone system because the user's expectations, the necessary actions and the results are meaningful. The placement of the controls were related to their function and the number of controls was almost at a one-to-one mapping with the number of functions.
Mapping is refers to the relationship of two things. Natural mappings refer to cultural standards or physical analogies. These lead to immediate understanding. For example, the length of a line could indicate a volume of music. As the volume is increased incrementally, the line should increase incrementally.
Feedback sending back the user information about what action has actuall has been done. Norman gives another telephone example to show his point. When telephones were first invented the user would push a button and get hear a tone. When the call was being connected the phone made noised so the user would know what was happening. Problems with modern telephone systems occur because there are more features and less feedback.
Unfortunately, it takes about five or six times to get a product right. If a design for an object is bad it can be considered a failure after the second or third time. After this the idea is usually dead and potentially good products are not developed further. The design of technology usually follows a U curve. At first the product is difficult to understand. The complexity is decreased to a comfortable level. Then more features are added and the complexity rises again. The same technology whose functionality makes life easier, makes life more diffuculty by making the object harder to use and learn. This is the paradox of technology. Although the added complexity and difficulty can not be avoided when functions are added, but this should be minimized with a good design. It should not be an excuse for a poor design.
Interesting Points
* He mentions that if consumers continue to buy poorly designed products, manufacturers will think they are doing a good job.
If all all the products to perform a necessary task are poorly designed how should users try to perform the task?
* Most ofthe examples he gives of systems are problematic because of a lack of user testing. Did any of the companies start user testing after seeing thelack of satisfaction or did noone complain?
Things I Liked
I really like all of the practical examples. I have encountered just about all of the systems that he said were problematic.
Problems With the Paper
* He uses some key terms like mapping and feedback in some of the stories in the beginning of the chapter but doesn't really define them until later.
* In the telephone scenario where he describes the calls being forwarded constanly, he makes it seem like that was a problem with the interface but the problem seems to be system based to me.
Review/Main points of Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things :
1) Most human error is, in actuality, design error
2) Good design must be a fundamental part of design from the start
3) Good design cannot be adopted once a product has been completed
4) Technology must provide function unnoticed, without disruption
5) Good design makes people happy to be seen using it
6) Good design makes products seem to work better, even if they don't
Reviews :
*....His first rule is ÔÇÿDesign for usabilityÔÇÖ. Usability, or ease of use, is paramount. DonÔÇÖt make navigation difficult. Make things visible ÔÇô donÔÇÖt keep the user in the dark. A good example of how this goes wrong in e-learning is the poor use of icons in navigation. Programmes sometimes have graphics that look like icons but are not active, merely illustrative. You click on them and nothing happens. Even worse, you may click on an icon and something unexpected happens. The icon may even be meaningless. In practice, icons may have to be supported by text, even if it does upset the Art Director.
Mapping is another of his principles in design. To steer a car you turn the wheel to the right to go right and left to go left. This is mapping. Apply this to navigation on the screen. To go forward the arrow should face to the right and left to go back.
#. Another Review
.. Donald A. Norman, a professor of computer science, psychology and cognitive science at Northwestern University and Stanford University, examines in this book the design of everyday things from a cognitive-psychological perspective. The book was originally published as ÔÇ£The Psychology of Everyday ThingsÔÇØ. Later, the paperback issue was called ÔÇ£The Design of Everyday ThingsÔÇØ ÔÇô allegedly because the book was placed in the psychology sections of libraries and was therefore ignored by designers.
Norman starts the first chapter with amusing anecdotes about unusable everyday objects ÔÇô doors, refrigerators, telephones, VCRs, car radios. He argues that these objects are unusable due to bad design rather than because of incompetent users. Mostly the lack of affordances is the crux of the matter. The term ÔÇ£affordanceÔÇØ refers to the perceived properties of a thing. For instance a door handle should signal whether the door has to be pushed or pulled.
In chapter two the author derives four universal design principles from the deficiencies of badly designed objects based on a psychological seven-stage model of action. Visibility: the user can tell the state of a device and possible actions by looking at it, a good conceptual model: the designer provides a coherent and consistent system image, good mappings: it is easy to determine the relationships between actions and results, and feedback: the user receives continuous feedback about the state of the system.
Chapters three and four deal with the usersÔÇÖ memory load and ways to reduce it: natural mappings and physical, semantic, cultural and logical constraints. An example of bad design is an array of switches that all look the same. The user has to remember the function of each switch. Of course, labelling the switches would help and is indeed very common, but if a door handle requires a label, it is most likely designed poorly.
Errors are discussed in chapter five. Norman explores the types of errors, where errors occur, and how they can be prevented. The next best thing to preventing errors is providing an undo function and reducing the severity of errors. After all, to err is human.
Chapters six and seven finally show why good design is so hard to achieve and consequently provide advice on how to design properly. Designer often have better technical skills than the users. Hence, they are not aware of possible usability flaws. Engineers are no better. They tend to add more and more features to their devices. The proposed solution is user-centred design. Features are useless as long as they are unusable. Therefore the design process needs to focus on the user, on his skills, on his intentions, on his environment. ÔÇ£When all else fails, standardizeÔÇØ is another piece of advice. Sometimes there are no natural mappings, sometimes it is difficult to visualise the current state of a device, and sometimes it is impossible to convey a conceptual model. Yes, designing everyday things is a difficult task, but that is no excuse for not trying hard.
Although the book is primarily about object design, its findings apply to websites and software interfaces as well. Norman is an exceptionally gifted story-teller. It is a pleasure to follow his thoughts. Even abstract concepts are marvellously exemplified. More advanced readers find over thirty pages of annotations, references to background literature and suggested readings. This book is a must-read for researchers and practitioners alike in the fields of usability and design.
# Another Review
In Chapter 1, "The Psychopathology of Everyday Things," Norman promotes visibility as "one of the most important principles of design" (4). Designers should adhere to what he calls "natural design." If a door is intended to be pushed, "the designer must provide signals that naturally indicate where to push." Excessive visibility, however, is a detriment to usability, for it interfers with "the mapping between intended actions and actual operations." Norman argues that "just the right things have to be visible; to indicate what parts operate and how...." Modern devices like VCRs, audio sets (and, I might add, computer interfaces) too often are ridden with gadgets and features that intimidate the user because of their excessive visibility. Instead, visibility, appropriate cues, and feedback for users' actions should constitute, according to Norman, the "psychology of everyday things." A designer must understand not only the psychology of human beings but also the psychology of "how things work" (12).
For Norman, good design is predicated on a mapping between the user's mental model and the designer's design or conceptual model.
The user's model is the mental model developed through interaction with the system. The system image results from the physical structure that has been built (including documentation, instructions, and labels). The designer expects the user's model to be identical to the design model. But the designer doesn't talk directly with the user -- all communication takes place through the system image. If the system image does not make the design model clear and consistent, then the user will end up with the wrong mental model. (16)
Norman uses a compelling example of the automobile as design where the user's mental model and the designer's conceptual model are optimally mapped. If the car demonstrates good design, it is because "things are visible" and the driver is the happy recipient of "natural relationships" between controls and what is controlled. The driver can understand the car's system where "single controls often have single functions" and "the relationships among the user's intentions, the required actions, and the results are sensible, nonarbitrary, and meaningful" (22).
The bottom line is customer satisfaction rather than customer frustration. If the design of modern telephone systems fares less well than that of the automobile, Norman argues it is because they "have more features and less feedback," thus making them more difficult to learn and use" (27).
Norman presents the book's title as a "lesson in design," a lesson that focuses on understanding user needs and usability testing with actual users. If designers trust only their instincts, they will run the risk of user error, user frustration, and even low user morale.
The contents of The Design of Everyday Things include the following chapters:
1. The Psychopathology of Everyday Things
2. The Psychology of Everyday Actions
3. Knowledge in the Head and in the World
4. Knowing What to Do
5. To Err Is Human