The Design of Everyday Things

by Don Norman

  188Air Florida crash: The information and quotations about the Air Florida crash are from the report of the National Transportation Safety Board (1982). See also the two books entitled Pilot Error (Hurst, 1976; Hurst, R. & Hurst, L. R., 1982). The two books are quite different. The second is better than the first, in part because at the time the first book was written, not much scientific evidence was available.

  190Checklists in medicine: Duke University’s examples of knowledge-based mistakes can be found at Duke University Medical Center (2013). An excellent summary of the use of checklists in medicine—and the many social pressures that have slowed up its adoption—is provided by Atul Gawande (2009).

  192Jidoka: The quotation from Toyota about Jidoka, and the Toyota Production System comes from the auto maker’s website (Toyota Motor Europe Corporate Site, 2013). Poka-yoke is described in many books and websites. I found the two books written by or with the assistance of the originator, Shigeo Shingo, to provide a valuable perspective (Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun, 1988; Shingo, 1986).

  193Aviation safety: The website for NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System provides details of the system, along with a history of its reports (NASA, 2013).

  197Hindsight: Baruch Fischhoff’s study is called “Hindsight ≠ Foresight: The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgment Under Uncertainty” (1975). And while you are at it, see his more recent work (Fischhoff, 2012; Fischhoff & Kadvany, 2011).

  198Designing for error: I discuss the idea of designing for error in a paper in Communications of the ACM, in which I analyze a number of the slips people make in using computer systems and suggest system design principles that might minimize those errors (Norman, 1983). This philosophy also pervades the book that our research team put together: User Centered System Design (Norman & Draper, 1986); two chapters are especially relevant to the discussions here: my “Cognitive Engineering” and the one I wrote with Clayton Lewis, “Designing for Error.”

  200Multitasking: There are many studies of the dangers and inefficiencies of multitasking. A partial review is given by Spink, Cole, & Waller (2008). David L. Strayer and his colleagues at the University of Utah have done numerous studies demonstrating rather severe impairment in driving behavior while using cell phones (Strayer & Drews, 2007; Strayer, Drews, & Crouch, 2006). Even pedestrians are distracted by cell phone usage, as demonstrated by a team of researchers from West Washington University (Hyman, Boss, Wise, McKenzie, & Caggiano, 2010).

  200Unicycling clown: The clever study of the invisible clown, riding a unicycle, “Did you see the unicycling clown? Inattentional blindness while walking and talking on a cell phone” was done by Hyman, Boss, Wise, McKenzie, & Caggiano (2010).

  208Swiss cheese model: James Reason introduced his extremely influential Swiss cheese model in 1990 (Reason, J., 1990; Reason, J. T., 1997).

  210Hersman: Deborah Hersman’s description of the design philosophy for aircraft comes from her talk on February 7, 2013, discussing the NTSB’s attempts to understand the cause of the fires in the battery compartments of Boeing 787 aircraft. Although the fires caused airplanes to make emergency landings, no passengers or crew were injured: the multiple layers of redundant protection maintained safety. Nonetheless, the fires and resulting damage were unexpected and serious enough that all Boeing 787 airlines were grounded until all parties involved had completed a thorough investigation of the causes of the incident and then gone through a new certification process with the Federal Aviation Agency (for the United States, and through the corresponding agencies in other countries). Although this was expensive and greatly inconvenient, it is an example of good proactive practice: take measures before accidents lead to injury and death (National Transportation Safety Board, 2013).

  212Resilience engineering: The excerpt from “Prologue: Resilience Engineering Concepts,” in the book Resilience Engineering, is reprinted by permission of the publishers (Hollnagel, Woods, & Leveson, 2006).

  213Automation: Much of my research and writings have addressed issues of automation. An early paper, “Coffee Cups in the Cockpit,” addresses this problem as well as the fact that when talking about incidents in a large country—or that occur worldwide—a “one-in-a-million chance” is not good enough odds (Norman, 1992). My book The Design of Future Things deals extensively with this issue (Norman, 2007).

  214Royal Majesty accident: An excellent analysis of the mode error accident with the cruise ship Royal Majesty is contained in Asaf Degani’s book on automation, Taming HAL: Designing Interfaces Beyond 2001 (Degani, 2004), as well as in the analyses by Lützhöft and Dekker and the official NTSB report (Lützhöft & Dekker, 2002; National Transportation Safety Board, 1997).

  CHAPTER SIX: DESIGN THINKING

  As pointed out in the “General Readings” section, a good introduction to design thinking is Change by Design by Tim Brown and Barry Katz (2009). Brown is CEO of IDEO and Katz a professor at the California College of the Arts, visiting professor at Stanford’s d.school, and an IDEO Fellow. There are multiple Internet sources; I like designthinkingforeducators.com.

  220Double diverge-converge pattern: The double diverge-converge pattern was first introduced by the British Design Council in 2005, which called it the “Double-Diamond Design Process Model” (Design Council, 2005).

  221HCD process: The human-centered design process has many variants, each similar in spirit but different in the details. A nice summary of the method I describe is provided by the HCD book and toolkit from the design firm IDEO (IDEO, 2013).

  227Prototyping: For prototyping, see Buxton’s book and handbook on sketching (Buxton, 2007; Greenberg, Carpendale, Marquardt, & Buxton, 2012). There are multiple methods used by designers to understand the nature of the problem and come to a potential solution. Vijay Kumar’s 101 Design Methods (2013) doesn’t even cover them all. Kumar’s book is an excellent treatment of design research methods, but its focus is on innovation, not the production of products, so it does not cover the actual development cycle. Physical prototyping, their tests, and iterations are outside the domain, as are the practical concerns of the marketplace, the topic of the last part of this chapter and all of chapter 7.

  227Wizard of Oz technique: The Wizard of Oz technique is named after L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Baum & Denslow, 1900). My use of the technique is described in the resulting paper from the group headed by artificial intelligence researcher Danny Bobrow at what was then called the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Bobrow et al., 1977). The “graduate student” sitting in the other room was Allen Munro, who then went on to a distinguished research career.

  229Nielsen: Jakob Nielsen’s argument that five users is the ideal number for most tests can be found on the Nielsen Norman group’s website (Nielsen, 2013).

  233Three goals: Marc Hassenzahl’s use of the three levels of goals (be-goals, do-goals, and motor-goals) is described in many places, but I strongly recommend his book Experience Design (Hassenzahl, 2010). The three goals come from the work of Charles Carver and Michael Scheier in their landmark book on the use of feedback models, chaos, and dynamical theory to explain much of human behavior (Carver & Scheier, 1998).

  246Age and performance: A good review of the impact of age on human factors is provided by Frank Schieber (2003). The report by Igo Grossman and colleagues is a typical example of research showing that careful studies reveal superior performance with age (Grossmann et al., 2010).

  254Swatch International Time: Swatch’s development of .beat time and the French decimal time are discussed in the Wikipedia article on decimal time (Wikipedia contributors, 2013b).

  CHAPTER SEVEN: DESIGN IN THE WORLD OF BUSINESS

  261Creeping featurism: A note for the technology historians. I’ve managed to trace the origin of this term to a talk by John Mashey in 1976 (Mashey, 1976). At that time Mashey was a computer scientist at Bell Laboratories, where he was one of the early developers of UNIX, a well-known computer operating system (which is still active as Unix, Linux, and the kerne
l underlying Apple’s Mac OS).

  262Youngme Moon: Youngme Moon’s book Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd (Moon, 2010) argues that “If there is one strain of conventional wisdom pervading every company in every industry, it is the importance of competing hard to differentiate yourself from the competition. And yet going head-to-head with the competition—with respect to features, product augmentations, and so on—has the perverse effect of making you just like everyone else.” (From the jacket of her book: see http://youngmemoon.com/Jacket.html.)

  266Word-gesture system: The word-gesture system that works by tracing the letters on the screen keyboard to type rapidly and efficiently (although not as fast as with a traditional ten-finger keyboard) is described in considerable detail by Shumin Zhai and Per Ola Kristensson, two of the developers of this method of typing (Zhai & Kristensson, 2012).

  269Multitouch screens: In the more than thirty years multitouch screens have been in the laboratories, numerous companies have launched products and failed. Nimish Mehta is credited with the invention of multitouch, discussed in his master’s thesis (1982) from the University of Toronto. Bill Buxton (2012), one of the pioneers in this field, provides a valuable review (he was working with multitouch displays in the early 1980s at the University of Toronto). Another excellent review of multitouch and gestural systems in general (as well as design principles) is provided by Dan Saffer in his book Designing Gestural Interfaces (2009). The story of Fingerworks and Apple is readily found by searching the web for “Fingerworks.”

  270Stigler’s law: See the comment about this in the notes for Chapter 2.

  271Telephonoscope: The illustration of the “Telephonoscope” was originally published in the December 9, 1878, issue of the British magazine Punch (for its 1879 Almanack). The picture comes from Wikipedia (Wikipedia contributors, 2013d), where it is in the public domain because of its age.

  276QWERTY keyboard: The history of the QWERTY keyboard is discussed in numerous articles. I thank Professor Neil Kay of University of Strathclyde for our e-mail correspondence and his article “Rerun the Tape of History and QWERTY Always Wins” (2013). This article led me to the “QWERTY People Archive” website by the Japanese researchers Koichi and Motoko Yasuoka, an incredibly detailed, valuable resource for those interested in the history of the keyboard, and in particular, of the QWERTY configuration (Yasuoka & Yasuoka, 2013). The article on the typewriter in the 1872 Scientific American is fun to read: the style of Scientific American has changed drastically since then (Anonymous, 1872).

  278Dvorak keyboard: Is Dvorak faster than QWERTY? Yes, but not by much: Diane Fisher and I studied a variety of keyboard layouts. We thought that alphabetically organized keys would be superior for beginners. No, they weren’t: we discovered that knowledge of the alphabet was not useful in finding the keys. Our studies of alphabetical and Dvorak keyboards were published in the journal Human Factors (Norman & Fisher, 1984). Admirers of the Dvorak keyboard claim much more than a 10 percent improvement, as well as faster learning rates and less fatigue. But I will stick by my studies and my statements. If you want to read more, including a worthwhile treatment of the history of the typewriter, see the book Cognitive Aspects of Skilled Typewriting, edited by William E. Cooper, which includes several chapters of research from my laboratory (Cooper, W. E., 1963; Norman & Fisher, 1984; Norman & Rumelhart, 1963; Rumelhart & Norman, 1982).

  278Keyboard ergonomics: Health aspects of keyboards are reported in National Institute of Health (2013).

  279Incremental and radical innovation: The Italian business professor Roberto Verganti and I discuss the principles of incremental and radical innovation (Norman & Verganti, 2014; Verganti, 2009, 2010).

  281Hill climbing: There are very good descriptions of the hill-climbing process for design in Christopher Alexander’s book Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964) and Chris Jones’s book Design Methods (1992; also see Jones, 1984).

  286Humans versus machines: The remarks by MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson were made in his talk at the June 2012 National Academy of Engineering symposium on manufacturing, design, and innovation (Brynjolfsson, 2012). His book, coauthored with Andrew McAfee—Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy—contains an excellent treatment of design and innovation (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2011).

  290Interactive media: Al Gore’s interactive media book is Our Choice (2011). Some of the videos from my early interactive book are still available: see Norman (1994 and 2011b).

  295Rise of the small: The section “The Rise of the Small” is taken from my essay written for the hundredth anniversary of the Steelcase company, reprinted here with Steelcase’s permission (Norman, 2011a).

  REFERENCES

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  Anderson, R. J. (2008). Security engineering—A guide to building dependable distributed systems (2nd edition). New York, NY: Wiley. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html

  Anonymous. (1872). The type writer. Scientific American, 27(6, August 10), 1.

  Atance, C. M., & O’Neill, D. K. (2001). Episodic future thinking. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5(12), 533–537. http://www.sciencessociales.uottawa.ca/ccll/eng/documents/15Episodicfuturethinking_000.pdf

  Aviation Safety Network. (1992). Accident description: Airbus A320-111. Retrieved February 13, 2013, from http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19920120–0

  Baum, L. F., & Denslow, W. W. (1900). The wonderful wizard of Oz. Chicago, IL; New York, NY: G. M. Hill Co. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/gen.32405

  Beyer, H., & Holtzblatt, K. (1998). Contextual design: Defining customer-centered systems. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

  Bobrow, D., Kaplan, R., Kay, M., Norman, D., Thompson, H., & Winograd, T. (1977). GUS, a frame-driven dialog system. Artificial Intelligence, 8(2), 155–173.

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  Brown, T., & Katz, B. (2009). Change by design: How design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. New York, NY: Harper Business.

  Brynjolfsson, E. (2012). Remarks at the June 2012 National Academy of Engineering symposium on Manufacturing, Design, and Innovation. In K. S. Whitefoot & S. Olson (Eds.), Making value: Integrating manufacturing, design, and innovation to thrive in the changing global economy. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

  Brynjolfsson, E., & McAfee, A. (2011). Race against the machine: How the digital revolution is accelerating innovation, driving productivity, and irreversibly transforming employment and the economy. Lexington, MA: Digital Frontier Press (Kindle Edition). http://raceagainstthemachine.com/

  Bürdek, B. E. (2005). Design: History, theory, and practice of product design. Boston, MA: Birkhäuser–Publishers for Architecture.

  Buxton, W. (2007). Sketching user experience: Getting the design right and the right design. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

  Buxton, W. (2012). Multi-touch systems that I have known and loved. Retrieved February 13, 2013, from http://www.billbuxton.com/multi-touchOverview.html

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mers want from your products. Harvard Business School Newsletter: Working Knowledge. Retrieved February 2, 2013, from http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5170.html

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

  Colum, P., & Ward, L. (1953). The Arabian nights: Tales of wonder and magnificence. New York, NY: Macmillan. (Also see http://www.bartleby.com/16/905. html for a similar rendition of ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.)

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

  Cooper, W. E. (Ed.). (1963). Cognitive aspects of skilled typewriting. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag.

  Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

  Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Finding flow: The psychology of engagement with everyday life. New York, NY: Basic Books.

  Degani, A. (2004). Chapter 8: The grounding of the Royal Majesty. In A. Degani (Ed.), Taming HAL: Designing interfaces beyond 2001. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/m/profile/adegani/Grounding%20of%20the%20Royal%20Majesty.pdf

  Dekker, S. (2011). Patient safety: A human factors approach. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

  Dekker, S. (2012). Just culture: Balancing safety and accountability. Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

  Dekker, S. (2013). Second victim: Error, guilt, trauma, and resilience. Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis.