Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things is a classic in the design world. He uses simple case studies and proposes simple principles that we all already know through the mundane experience of existing and interacting with objects and artifacts.
We are people. We use things. Sometimes these things don’t work the way they should, or the way we think they should, so we need people like Don Norman to explain why.
Sometimes good design is a product of research and a deep understanding of form and function, and sometimes it’s just a happy accident. We can study it forever, but sometimes good design is nothing more than a minor modification of something that almost worked in the first place. That’s called innovation.
I love Norman’s book because he simply and beautifully illustrates some great points, and he coins a few good words that have become part of the design and user experience lexicon.
I don’t know if Norman’s book ever made me think differently about how things are designed, but it has certainly served to justify my outrage about poor design. Whenever I open a “re-sealable” package that doesn’t actually re-seal, I think of Don Norman. If nothing else, Norman got a lot of people thinking that even the simplest things that frustrate us because of their inherently poor design can be improved, if we bothered to care about improving such things.