Ben Waber reviewed The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
An Enlightening but Slightly Anachronistic Look at Effective Design Methods
4 stars
This book provides an excellent, well-organized analysis of design methods that lead to pleasing and easy to use physical products. However this book is very much a product of its time (originally published in 1988 with a different title): it's extremely American/Western focused, pretty much ignores accessibility, and has little to say about digital interfaces. I did get a kick out of the section referencing expert systems for people to navigate terribly designed telephone interfaces, with strong echoes in people today working on using LLMs to, for example, help set up AWS servers.
People born after 1995 will probably have trouble following many of the product references as well, which is fairly important for understanding the approaches Norman advocates for. That being said, if you meet the age requirement this is a useful, thought-provoking book. Highly recommend.
This book provides an excellent, well-organized analysis of design methods that lead to pleasing and easy to use physical products. However this book is very much a product of its time (originally published in 1988 with a different title): it's extremely American/Western focused, pretty much ignores accessibility, and has little to say about digital interfaces. I did get a kick out of the section referencing expert systems for people to navigate terribly designed telephone interfaces, with strong echoes in people today working on using LLMs to, for example, help set up AWS servers.
People born after 1995 will probably have trouble following many of the product references as well, which is fairly important for understanding the approaches Norman advocates for. That being said, if you meet the age requirement this is a useful, thought-provoking book. Highly recommend.
