Book Reading #18 - Design of Everyday Things

Title:

Chapter 6: The Design Challenge

Reference:

Norman, Donald. The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic, 2002.

Summary:

In the chapter The Design Challenge, Norman states the challenges facing designers and users.  He shows that good design comes from an evolution of the design process - being able to reproduce and manipulate key things in order to simply tweak a design.  When we look at things like car manufacturers, we see that this is not the case because everyone just wants to be new and exciting making usefulness and usability fall below aesthetics.  They typewriter is a great example of evolution.

Designers tend to put aesthetics first, they are often not the typical users, and neither may be their clients.  This makes it difficult for the designer to anticipate problems by the user.

The author again went into design flaws such as faucets.  He also noted that everyone is unique, and it is never "one size fits all".

He names two deadly temptations for the designer: creeping featureless which is the tendency to add too many features, and the worshiping of false images which is complexity.

Lastly he focuses on computers.  He notes they are not of good design but could be.  He comments on how Xerox Star produced a good visible and usable product followed by Macintosh.  They had their flaws but gave hope to good user interface in the future.

Discussion:

I thought it was interesting how this chapter Norman actually related these things to computer science and computer scientists.  It was cool to see the way that he paralleled these things as we have been forced to do it in our mind for so much of the book.
There were several crossovers of this book and HCI remixed; the mention of Xerox Star and the invisible computer to note a couple.