Great, classic book that makes you think about what makes good design and will help you notice good and bad design everywhere you go. It gives a list of things to consider incorporating that will improve your design, whatever the thing is you’re designing. I especially like the examples, some of which are pretty entertaining in their awfulness – and sad in their ubiquity. It is a little out of date especially when discussing software design, but its insights are still current and very much worth applying.

Norman’s principles of design:

• Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head
• Simplify the structure of tasks
• Make things visible: bridge the gulfs of Execution and Evaluation
• Get the mappings right
• Exploit the power of constraints, both natural and artificial
• Design for error
• When all else fails, standardise

This is the third book I’ve gotten from Travis and Susie. I don’t usually comment on books part way through, but I can already tell from the preface alone that I’m going to like it.

Here’s my favourite quote so far:

As companies design for more usability and understanding, they will discover a competitive edge, for these principles save customers time and money while increasing morale. As this message spreads, more and more customers will reject the products that are unusable or that lead to frequent error and frustration.

Basically, I read that, and I immediately think “Apple Mac”, or perhaps “iPod”. It’s also a warning to anyone that is involved in crafting things that are meant to be used by people.

Anybody who cares about the products they create or use should read this book.

Rereading this for my Learning & Performance class. It’s still good stuff.

Good way of thinking about making technology human-compatible.

I felt like this book could’ve been summarized by a short essay. Most of it was filler.

I’ve been waiting for my library to get this in for weeks, but today I finally just gave in and bought it. So far so good.

Quite an interesting book. The reason I picked it up was that I saw it mentioned on many other webloggers’ reading lists, and the topic sounded interesting. While the subject matter pertains primarily to product design, and what should go into good product design, I found the information and suggestions useful for design of any kind. The writing was clean and conversational, and never really ventured into being too technical at all. Definitely a must-read for those working in IA and web/computer usability.

Recommended by my old boss.