The Design of Everyday Things

The Psychopathology of Everyday Things is a chapter in the book The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman. This chapter addresses the frustration and psychology of everyday things as well as great techniques to provide well designed products. He gives numerous examples of everyday things that work along with big design failures. Here are some important ideas I drew from Norman's first chapter:

• Questions that users have about a device should be answered easily by the design, without the need for words or symbols or trial and error.
• Designers should help the user by showing only the things that need to be visible on a device. The lack of visibility makes a device difficult to operate while an excess makes devices seem intimidating.
• Affordances, the perceived and actual properties of something, give strong clues as to how it works. Use this to your advantage instead of failing the design with pictures, labels, or instructions.
• If something happens right after an action, the user automatically believes that it is a reaction to their action. If the behavior was not caused by the action, it was poorly designed and allowed false causality.
• If designers know how the mind works as well as how things work they can take advantage of the things people are expected to know.
• Good design makes things visible with good mappings, natural relationships between controls and the controlled, and gives single controls single functions. What the user intends for the control to do happens and it is rational, not illogical, and consequential.
• Bad design happens when the number of actions exceeds the number of controls because the actions do not come naturally to the user. They will be required to remember a pattern for the correct action.
• A good designer takes time to consider the use of the device, the way that it can be abused, the errors that can be made, and the functions people will expect.
• Technology is a paradox: The same technology that makes life easier by giving us more control and options also complicates our life by making the devices so complex that people cannot learn how to use it.
• The paradox is no excuse. Using good design principles can make the complexities manageable to the user. 

These ideas will be very beneficial to me for the remainder of this course as well as afterward even though it was written in the 80's because the concepts of good design are still relevant today. As I continue in physical computing, I will use these ideas to create well designed devices that follow his guidelines and give the users an enjoyable experience.