The Design of Everyday Things

by Don Norman

  An excellent introduction to design research is provided in Jan Chipchase and Simon Steinhardt’s Hidden in Plain Sight (2013). The book chronicles the life of a design researcher who studies people by observing them in their homes, barber shops, and living quarters around the world. Chipchase is executive creative director of global insights at Frog Design, working out of the Shanghai office. The work of Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt in Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems (1998) presents a powerful method of analyzing behavior; they have also produced a useful workbook (Holtzblatt, Wendell, & Wood, 2004).

  There are many excellent books. Here are a few more:

  Buxton, W. (2007). Sketching user experience: Getting the design right and the right design. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. (And see the companion workbook [Greenberg, Carpendale, Marquardt, & Buxton, 2012].)

  Coates, D. (2003). Watches tell more than time: Product design, information, and the quest for elegance. New York: McGraw-Hill.

  Cooper, A., Reimann, R., & Cronin, D. (2007). About face 3: The essentials of interaction design. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Pub.

  Hassenzahl, M. (2010). Experience design: Technology for all the right reasons. San Rafael, California: Morgan & Claypool.

  Moggridge, B. (2007). Designing interactions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. http://www.designinginteractions.com. Chapter 10 describes the methods of interaction design: http://www.designinginteractions.com/chapters/10

  Two handbooks provide comprehensive, detailed treatments of the topics in this book:

  Jacko, J. A. (2012). The human-computer interaction handbook: Fundamentals, evolving technologies, and emerging applications (3rd edition). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

  Lee, J. D., & Kirlik, A. (2013). The Oxford handbook of cognitive engineering. New York: Oxford University Press.

  Which book should you look at? Both are excellent, and although expensive, well worth the price for anyone who intends to work in these fields. The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook, as the title suggests, focuses primarily on computer-enhanced interactions with technology, whereas the Handbook of Cognitive Engineering has a much broader coverage. Which book is better? That depends upon what problem you are working on. For my work, both are essential.

  Finally, let me recommend two websites:

  Interaction Design Foundation: Take special note of its Encyclopedia articles. www.interaction-design.org

  SIGCHI: The Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group for ACM. www.sigchi.org

  CHAPTER ONE: THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY THINGS

  2Coffeepot for Masochists: This was created by the French artist Jacques Carelman (1984). The photograph shows a coffeepot inspired by Carelman, but owned by me. Photograph by Aymin Shamma for the author.

  10Affordances: The perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson invented the word affordance to explain how people navigated the world (Gibson, 1979). I introduced the term into the world of interaction design in the first edition of this book (Norman, 1988). Since then, the number of writings on affordance has been enormous. Confusion over the appropriate way to use the term prompted me to introduce the concept of “signifier” in my book Living with Complexity (Norman, 2010), discussed throughout this book, but especially in Chapters 1 and 4.

  CHAPTER TWO: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY ACTIONS

  38Gulfs of execution and evaluation: The story of the gulfs and bridges of execution and evaluation came from research performed with Ed Hutchins and Jim Hollan, then part of a joint research team between the Naval Personnel Research and Development Center and the University of California, San Diego (Hollan and Hutchins are now professors of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego). The work examined the development of computer systems that were easier to learn and easier to use, and in particular, of what has been called direct manipulation computer systems. The initial work is described in the chapter “Direct Manipulation Interfaces” in the book from our laboratories, User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction (Hutchins, Hollan, & Norman, 1986). Also see the paper by Hollan, Hutchins, and David Kirsh, “Distributed Cognition: A New Foundation for Human-Computer Interaction Research” (Hollan, Hutchins, & Kirsh, 2000).

  43Levitt: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” See Christensen, Cook, & Hal, 2006. The fact that Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt is credited with the quote about the drill and the hole is a good example of Stigler’s law: “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” Thus, Levitt himself attributed the statement about drills and holes to Leo McGinneva (Levitt, 1983). Stigler’s law is, itself, an example of the law: Stigler, a professor of statistics, wrote that he learned the law from the sociologist Robert Merton. See more at Wikipedia, “Stigler’s Law of Eponymy” (Wikipedia contributors, 2013c).

  46Doorknob: The question “In the house you lived in three houses ago, as you entered the front door, was the doorknob on the left or right?” comes from my paper “Memory, Knowledge, and the Answering of Questions” (Norman, 1973).

  53Visceral, behavioral, and reflective: Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman, 2011), gives an excellent introduction to modern conceptions of the role of conscious and subconscious processing. The distinctions between visceral, behavioral, and reflective processing form the basis of my book Emotional Design (Norman, 2002, 2004). This model of the human cognitive and emotional system is described in more technical detail in the scientific paper I wrote with Andrew Ortony and William Revelle: “The Role of Affect and Proto-affect in Effective Functioning” (Ortony, Norman, & Revelle, 2005). Also see “Designers and Users: Two Perspectives on Emotion and Design” (Norman & Ortony, 2006). Emotional Design contains numerous examples of the role of design at all three levels.

  58Thermostat: The valve theory of the thermostat is taken from Kempton, a study published in the journal Cognitive Science (1986). Intelligent thermostats try to predict when they will be required, turning on or off earlier than the simple control illustrated in Chapter 2 can specify, to ensure that the desired temperature is reached at the desired time, without over- or undershooting the target.

  63Positive psychology: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow can be found in his several books on the topic (1990, 1997). Martin (Marty) Seligman developed the concept of learned helplessness, and then applied it to depression (Seligman, 1992). However, he decided that it was wrong for psychology to continually focus upon difficulties and abnormalities, so he teamed up with Csikszentmihalyi to create a movement for positive psychology. An excellent introduction is provided in the article by the two of them in the journal American Psychologist (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Since then, positive psychology has expanded to include books, journals, and conferences.

  66Human error: People blame themselves: Unfortunately, blaming the user is imbedded in the legal system. When major accidents occur, official courts of inquiry are set up to assess the blame. More and more often, the blame is attributed to “human error.” But in my experience, human error usually is a result of poor design: why was the system ever designed so that a single act by a single person could cause calamity? An important book on this topic is Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents (1999). Chapter 5 of this book provides a detailed examination of human error.

  72Feedforward: Feedforward is an old concept from control theory, but I first encountered it applied to the seven stages of action in the paper by Jo Vermeulen, Kris Luyten, Elise van den Hoven, and Karin Coninx (2013).

  CHAPTER THREE: KNOWLEDGE IN THE HEAD AND IN THE WORLD

  74American coins: Ray Nickerson and Marilyn Adams, as well as David Rubin and Theda Kontis, showed that people could neither recall nor recognize accurately the pictures and words on American coins (Nickerson & Adams, 1979; Rubin & Kontis, 1983).

  80French coins: The quotation about the French government release of the 10-franc coin comes from an article by Stanley M
eisler (1986), reprinted with permission of the Los Angeles Times.

  80Descriptions in memory: The suggestion that memory storage and retrieval is mediated through partial descriptions was put forth in a paper with Danny Bobrow (Norman & Bobrow, 1979). We argued that, in general, the required specificity of a description depends on the set of items among which a person is trying to distinguish. Memory retrieval can therefore involve a prolonged series of attempts during which the initial retrieval descriptions yield incomplete or erroneous results, so that the person must keep trying, each retrieval attempt coming closer to the answer and helping to make the description more precise.

  83Constraints of rhyming: Given just the cues for meaning (the first task), the people David C. Rubin and Wanda T. Wallace tested could guess the three target words used in these examples only 0 percent, 4 percent, and 0 percent of the time, respectively. Similarly, when the same target words were cued only by rhymes, they still did quite poorly, guessing the targets correctly only 0 percent, 0 percent, and 4 percent of the time, respectively. Thus, each cue alone offered little assistance. Combining the meaning cue with the rhyming cue led to perfect performance: the people got the target words 100 percent of the time (Rubin & Wallace, 1989).

  86‘Ali Baba: Alfred Bates Lord’s work is summarized in his book The Singer of Tales (1960). The quotation from “‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” comes from The Arabian Nights: Tales of Wonder and Magnificence, selected and edited by Padraic Colum, translated by Edward William Lane (Colum & Ward, 1953). The names here are in an unfamiliar form: most of us know the magic phrase as “Open Sesame,” but according to Colum, “Simsim” is the authentic transliteration.

  87Passwords: How do people cope with passwords? There are lots of studies: (Anderson, 2008; Florêncio, Herley, & Coskun, 2007; National Research Council Steering Committee on the Usability, Security, and Privacy of Computer Systems, 2010; Norman, 2009; Schneier, 2000).

  To find the most common passwords, just search using some phrase such as “most common passwords.” My article on security, which led to numerous newspaper column references to it, is available on my website and was also published in the magazine for human-computer interaction, Interactions (Norman, 2009).

  89Hiding places: The quotation about professional thieves’ knowledge of how people hide things comes from Winograd and Soloway’s study “On Forgetting the Locations of Things Stored in Special Places” (1986).

  93Mnemonics: Mnemonic methods were covered in my book Memory and Attention, and although that book is old, the mnemonic techniques are even older, and are still unchanged (Norman, 1969, 1976). I discuss the effort of retrieval in Learning and Memory (Norman, 1982). Mnemonic techniques are easy to find: just search the web for “mnemonics.” Similarly, the properties of short- and long-term memory are readily found by an Internet search or in any text on experimental psychology, cognitive psychology, or neuropsychology (as opposed to clinical psychology) or a text on cognitive science. Alternatively, search online for “human memory,” “working memory,” “short-term memory” or “long-term memory.” Also see the book by Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory (2001). What are Schacter’s seven sins? Transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, persistence, and bias.

  101Whitehead: Alfred North Whitehead’s quotation about the power of automated behavior is from Chapter 5 of his book An Introduction to Mathematics (1911).

  107Prospective memory: Considerable research on prospective memory and memory for the future is summarized in the articles by Dismukes on prospective memory and the review by Cristina Atance and Daniela O’Neill on memory for the future, or what they call “episodic future thinking” (Atance & O’Neill, 2001; Dismukes, 2012).

  112Transactive memory: The term transactive memory was coined by Harvard professor of psychology Daniel Wegner (Lewis & Herndon, 2011; Wegner, D. M., 1987; Wegner, T. G., & Wegner, D. M., 1995).

  113Stove controls: The difficulty in mapping stove controls to burners has been understood by human factors experts for over fifty years: Why are stoves still designed so badly? This issue was addressed in 1959, the very first year of the Human Factors Journal (Chapanis & Lindenbaum, 1959).

  118Culture and design: My discussion of the impact of culture on mappings was heavily informed by my discussions with Lera Boroditsky, then at Stanford University, but now in the cognitive science department at the University of California, San Diego. See her book chapter “How Languages Construct Time” (2011). Studies of the Australian Aborigine were reported by Núñez & Sweetser (2006).

  CHAPTER FOUR: KNOWING WHAT TO DO: CONSTRAINTS, DISCOVERABILITY, AND FEEDBACK

  126InstaLoad: A description of Microsoft’s InstaLoad technology for battery contacts is available on its website: www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/support/licensing-instaload-overview.

  129Cultural frames: See Roger Schank and Robert B. Abelson’s Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding (1977) or Erving Goffman’s classic and extremely influential books The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) and Frame Analysis (1974). I recommend Presentation as the most relevant (and easiest to read) of his works.

  129Violating social conventions: “Try violating cultural norms and see how uncomfortable that makes you and the other people.” Jan Chipchase and Simon Steinhardt’s Hidden in Plain Sight provides many examples of how design researchers can deliberately violate social conventions so as to understand how a culture works. Chipchase reports an experiment in which able-bodied young people request that seated subway passengers give up their seat to them. The experimenters were surprised by two things. First, a large proportion of people obeyed. Second, the people most affected were the experimenters themselves: they had to force themselves to make the requests and then felt bad about it for a long time afterward. A deliberate violation of social constraints can be uncomfortable for both the violator and the violated (Chipchase & Steinhardt, 2013).

  137Light switch panel: For the construction of my home light switch panel, I relied heavily on the electrical and mechanical ingenuity of Dave Wargo, who actually did the design, construction, and installation of the switches.

  156Natural sounds: Bill Gaver, now a prominent design researcher at Goldsmiths College, University of London (UK), first alerted me to the importance of natural sounds in his PhD dissertation and later publications (Gaver, W., 1997; Gaver, W. W., 1989). There has been considerable research on sound since the early days: see, for example, Gygi & Shafiro (2010).

  160Electric vehicles: The quotation from the US government rule on sounds for electric vehicles can be found on the Department of Transportation’s website (2013).

  CHAPTER FIVE: HUMAN ERROR? NO, BAD DESIGN

  There has been a lot of work on the study of error, human reliability, and resilience. A good source, besides the items cited below, is the Wiki of Science article on human error (Wiki of Science, 2013). Also see the book Behind Human Error (Woods, Decker, Cook, Johannesen, & Sarter, 2010).

  Two of the most important workers in human error are British psychologist James Reason and Danish engineer Jens Rasmussen. Also see the books by the Swedish investigator Sidney Dekker, and MIT professor Nancy Leveson (Dekker, 2011, 2012, 2013; Leveson, N., 2012; Leveson, N. G., 1995; Rasmussen, Duncan, & Leplat, 1987; Rasmussen, Pejtersen, & Goodstein, 1994; Reason, J. T., 1990, 2008).

  Unless otherwise noted, all the examples of slips in this chapter were collected by me, primarily from the errors of myself, my research associates, my colleagues, and my students. Everyone diligently recorded his or her slips, with the requirement that only the ones that had been immediately recorded would be added to the collection. Many were first published in Norman (1981).

  165F-22 crash: The analysis of the Air Force F-22 crash comes from a government report (Inspector General United States Department of Defense, 2013). (This report also contains the original Air Force report as Appendix C.)

  170Slips and mistakes: The descriptions of skill-bas
ed, rule-based, and knowledge-based behavior is taken from Jens Rasmussen’s paper on the topic (1983), which still stands as one of the best introductions. The classification of errors into slips and mistakes was done jointly by me and Reason. The classification of mistakes into rule-based and knowledge-based follows the work of Rasmussen (Rasmussen, Goodstein, Andersen, & Olsen, 1988; Rasmussen, Pejtersen, & Goodstein, 1994; Reason, J. T., 1990, 1997, 2008). Memory lapse errors (both slips and mistakes) were not originally distinguished from other errors: they were put into separate categories later, but not quite the same way I have done here.

  172“Gimli Glider”: The so-called Gimli Glider accident was an Air Canada Boeing 767 that ran out of fuel and had to glide to a landing at Gimli, a decommissioned Canadian Air Force base. There were numerous mistakes: search for “Gimli Glider accident.” (I recommend the Wikipedia treatment.)

  174Capture error: The category “capture error” was invented by James Reason (1979).

  178Airbus: The difficulties with the Airbus and its modes are described in (Aviation Safety Network, 1992; Wikipedia contributors, 2013a). For a disturbing description of another design problem with the Airbus—that the two pilots (the captain and the first officer) can both control the joysticks, but there is no feedback, so one pilot does not know what the other pilot is doing—see the article in the British newspaper The Telegraph (Ross & Tweedie, 2012).

  181The Kiss nightclub fire in Santa Maria, Brazil: It is described in numerous Brazilian and American newspapers (search the web for “Kiss nightclub fire”). I first learned about it from the New York Times (Romero, 2013).

  186Tenerife crash: My source for information about the Tenerife crash is from a report by Roitsch, Babcock, and Edmunds issued by the American Airline Pilots Association (Roitsch, Babcock, & Edmunds, undated). It is perhaps not too surprising that it differs in interpretation from the Spanish government’s report (Spanish Ministry of Transport and Communications, 1978), which in turn differs from the report by the Dutch Aircraft Accident Inquiry Board. A nice review of the 1977 Tenerife accident—written in 2007—that shows its long-lasting importance has been written by Patrick Smith for the website Salon.com (Smith, 2007, Friday, April 6, 04:00 AM PDT).