Thinking books · Creativity · Don Norman, 1988
The Design of Everyday Things — the big ideas
Why things are hard to use, and why the person using them blames themselves.
Free — no account needed to read
The big ideas
When someone uses a thing wrongly, that is usually information about the design rather than about the person — a reframing that transfers directly to processes, documents and teams.
Affordances and signifiers: what an object makes possible, and what tells you so. Most confusion comes from the second being absent.
A person’s mental model of how something works is built from what they can see, so a hidden mechanism produces a wrong model and a predictable error.
Design for error rather than against it: assume mistakes and make them visible, cheap and reversible.
Practise it — no need to have read it
Find something at work people repeatedly get wrong. Write what they must be assuming, and what about the design produced that assumption.
A hint: Then fix the signifier rather than writing more instructions.
Where it shows up in real life
- Any process people keep getting wrong
- Documentation
- Product design
Described in our own words with the source named — never quoted, and not a substitute for reading the book.
The thinking it builds
- Problem Solving — Break complex problems into manageable parts
- Systems Thinking — Understand connections and consequences