A Review of The Design of Everyday Things by Norman, D. A. (2013).

I completed this review in November 2022, but I am only just putting it out now.

Since I ventured into the field of User Experience (UX) design 4 years ago, designing my own digital business and doing freelance work for other businesses, it has been my natural urge to improve on the job with each new design. When I began my journey, a great percentage of all the resources I found for starters in the industry included a direct mention of the importance of Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things (DOET). Norman first published this book in 1988 as The Psychology of Everyday Things (POET). The field of UX design was in its early stages; the author has an impressive background as a professor of psychology, cognitive science, and computer science, and the vice president of advanced technology at Apple. Hence, it is no wonder why the book quickly became relevant and remained so until the seven-chaptered second edition—DOET—in 2013, which has also been relevant in recent (2022) research. From a rhetorical viewpoint, this book intends to answer the question: how should designers effectively do their job of communicating technology to users/laypeople? This is a question that rings across the UX industry from beginners to professionals; it is the backbone of everything UX designers do.

In the preface, Norman states that technology changes but the principles of human psychology will remain the same (p. xiv). Specifically for experience designers, this book offers insight into how to design for people. It serves as a handbook to reach for when seeking practical applications of the design principles that build useful, usable, and equitable products. The discussion on Human-Centered Design (HCD) in chapters one and six, though brief, appropriately describes how user involvement in the design process can be an invaluable design tool. Also established in this book are research and design processes any designer can adopt. Such processes like Toyota’s investigative 5 why’s as discussed in chapter 5 illustrate the relevance of exhuming root causes before delving into the solution hunt. Norman argues that, amidst the discussed challenges designers face, they need to understand their role toward the users and the business they design for; embracing insights from user research as well as market research.

Norman recognized that a business can neither grow by leveraging bad designs, nor good designs make a good business without understanding the market. This thought warrants the concluding chapter’s absolute focus on the relationship between the business and the design. It is therefore important for business owners to understand how product design decisions influence customers’ decisions toward their business. This idea follows from the first chapter where Norman discussed the science of how people see things.

Chapter one introduces The Psychopathology of Everyday Things. Should modern designs force behavior on people or maintain the rich history of experiences that people have in common with one another? Norman noted that the two most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding. The role of discoverability was elaborated using the design principles of affordances, signifiers, constraints, mappings, feedback, and the conceptual model of the system. Simply put, when people look at a design, they should know what to do. However, considering the factors that need to be met and disciplines that need to work together to design a product, one can understand that “designing well is not easy”  (p. 35).

The role of understanding (via a conceptual model) and emotions in design required Norman to investigate The Psychology of Everyday Actions in the second chapter. How do people do things? Norman answered this question using the concept of the Gulf of Execution and Gulf of Evaluation, the interplay between the 7-stage model of action (goal, plan, specify, perform, perceive, interpret, compare), and the 3-level model of processing (reflective, behavioral, visceral). The systems of human cognition, processing, and emotion in designs connect to the principles of design, such that when users have a negative experience, the design should take the blame. 

Having established how people do things, Norman proceeds into chapter three discussing how the human memory system handles knowledge, and how this knowledge is applied when action is required. Norman observes that for usable products, “simplified models are the key to success…” (p. 77) because they allow people to act precisely based on the knowledge in the head and the knowledge in the world. Designers can achieve this by passing important messages using clear signals through natural mapping (while being cognizant of culture). Knowledge in the world makes users have a wide range of expectations when they attempt to use a product, so it is important that designers limit the number of possible expectations. This limitation increases the possibility of users behaving appropriately as the design intended, else every user will try and fail (and repeat or quit). A strategic limitation is achieved using constraints, conventions, and controls like Norman described in chapter four as forcing functions. But a challenge exists when conventions change: people need time to adapt. Users may display inappropriate behavior. This error can be a mistake or a slip depending on how the 7-level of action was affected. 

In chapter five, Norman restates that, depending on the state of the user's conscience, the root causes of errors are more likely to stem from a design failure than from a user’s fault. However, Norman advocates for products to be designed to accommodate error by treating the human and mechanical systems as one. Chapter 6 proposes for designers to involve potential users in the design process (HCD) or let the conceptual model of the user’s activities determine the product structure: whichever is appropriate. But to design usable products that meet business requirements, designers need to determine the right problem and the right solution while collaborating with other teams. This and related factors like standards and world acceptance create challenges for designers. These challenges influence Design In The World of Business as discussed in chapter seven. 

Although salient aspects of design were elaborated in this book, it would take only a critical reflector to decipher the psychology of communication embedded within. If only communication, an important part of design, were made more recognizable, this book could have served as a one-stop introduction to design.

The book includes real and carefully-chosen digital and non-computer-based examples and elaborations that Norman trusts will be relevant for the next quarter of a century at least, even with unpredictable change happening in the technology landscape. By putting out such complex knowledge in a simplified manner, this book satisfies Thomas Jefferson’s quote in his reply to the American Philosophical Society in 1808: “I feel…an ardent desire to see knowledge so disseminated through the mass of mankind that it may…reach even the extremes of society: beggars and kings.” Evidently, there are people who have switched to design careers because they read this book (p. xii). Hence, I would recommend The Design of Everyday Things to anyone who is curious about how everyday things are structured.