Donald Norman- The Design of Everyday Things…

Donald Norman- The Design of Everyday Things

I read chapters from this classic book many years ago, and I remembered Norman’s indictment of the VCR for its hard to read controls and widgets.  The VCR’s design doesn’t make its uses and functions “visible”, its “affordances” are not clear.  One of the most important principles of design, according to Norman, is “visibility”- visibility refers to the mapping between the design of an object and its operation, so that the design communicates cues and feedback about how to use and operate the object.

Mapping is another important idea. The user will have a mental model of how to use the object, and the object also yields a conceptual model (usually a product of the designer’s intentions) for how it can be used. When the two models coincide, then there is a close “mapping”. Norman writes that the designer usually expects the user’s model to follow the designer’s mental model- but this is obviously not always the case. The designer needs to better understand the user, the design itself must be user-centered.

Norman made the notion of “affordances” famous through this book, and though he didn’t invent the term, it seems he popularized it so that it entered the stream of standard design thinking.

The difference from Norman’s discussions in this book and his later book on ‘emotional design’ is in his de-emphasis here on aesthetics. Norman’s user-centered approach here is really more about functionality where aesthetics doesn’t really contribute a benefit. But clearly, Norman does move on to acknowledge the importance of aesthetics in the user’s relationship to the everyday things that support his or her functioning in the world, and also primarily to the processing of information about the world- that emotions play an undeniable role in the cognition and the forming of mental models.