The Design of Everyday Things

This is an essential for any designer's library. It squarely puts the ownice of design on the designer, and explains through example why that does not always happen, even though it should.

Some examples are dated but the concepts remain unblemished by time.

A classic and Quick Read Essential for any Designer or Really any Customer! I absolutely love this book! I bought it for an upcoming design interview and this book taught me a lot of useful information. Not only did it teach me a lot, but it was also pretty entertaining and a quick read. I thought it was priced very well and it did help me become a better professional.

I was worried when I started reading this book that now, two decades after its original release, it would be totally obsolete. Yet the timeliness of Norman's examples surprised me: We are still surrounded by doors and sinks that fail to convey their affordances, by vast arrays of unlabeled light switches, and by new gadgets that refuse to follow established conventions. This book is a rich and enjoyable plea for sane design.

The Design of Everyday Things is a great book for designers, information architects, programmers and technical architects (and that's just in my field!). The author uses real life examples to illustrate design flaws and examples of good design. Our info arch team read this in preparation for doing site layouts and designs, and they recommended it to me - and I highly recommend it to anyone needing an overview of what makes good things work.

This book has several very important pictures that show product design trade offs in real life. In the Kindle version these pictures are incomprehensible. They are too small and can't be resized. A lot of the value of this book is lost because of the unavailability of the pictures.

the store could solve this problem by making the illustrations available online.

I bought this book after hearing about it for about a year. I've yet to finish it, but so far it has been a good read for anyone interested in thinking about design. It contains examples and clear explanations, and is almost textbook-style in writing...almost. It also manages to avoid being dry.

This book is fantastic, anyone in product management or design should read this. So many little things in the world you interact with have bad design. There are these doors at my work that have pull handles on both sides, but one side you must push on. I want to hang a push sign so people stop walking into them!

I now view the world in signifiers and affordances, if you like products and making them better you'll love this book.

I read the kindle version. Excellent examples, which helped me to grasp new ideas as a beginner. The author is obviously an expert, but he uses his own principles of helping a user (the reader) by making every concept as simple as it should be but no simpler. :)

There are alot of things that can be easily forgotten about when designing. This book points many of them out. It makes you realize how much thought went in to that door handle a few feet away. While reading this visions of problems you have had with badly designed products will pop into your mind. This book is highly recommended!

For anyone who wants to learn about how humans interacts with things in their daily lives, or to get a jump start on how to design things (for anyone studying it in school), this is a great and all encompassing book that tells you (and shows you) how to approach design for the human environment.

I've read through this book about three times now, and every time I read it, the light bulb goes on. I'm a sys admin by day, but a designer by night, so this book is an excellent source of the question, "Just why is the Internet so boring?" by delving deep into the design of everyday things, like doors, controls, etc.. I think it's excellent and would recommend it to anyone wanting to understand the psychology of why the design phase is so important over marketability.

Kind of a fun book. I read Emotional Design, another book by the same author. I liked it so much I sought out other titles by him and found this. More reading on functionality of everyday objects and how our emotions play into what we perceive as a good design. Interesting.

There are alot of things that can be easily forgotten about when designing. This book points many of them out. It makes you realize how much thought went in to that door handle a few feet away. While reading this visions of problems you have had with badly designed products will pop into your mind. This book is highly recommended!

For anyone who wants to learn about how humans interacts with things in their daily lives, or to get a jump start on how to design things (for anyone studying it in school), this is a great and all encompassing book that tells you (and shows you) how to approach design for the human environment.

I've read through this book about three times now, and every time I read it, the light bulb goes on. I'm a sys admin by day, but a designer by night, so this book is an excellent source of the question, "Just why is the Internet so boring?" by delving deep into the design of everyday things, like doors, controls, etc.. I think it's excellent and would recommend it to anyone wanting to understand the psychology of why the design phase is so important over marketability.

Kind of a fun book. I read Emotional Design, another book by the same author. I liked it so much I sought out other titles by him and found this. More reading on functionality of everyday objects and how our emotions play into what we perceive as a good design. Interesting.

I really enjoyed The Design of Everyday Things. I'm a communications manager and web designer, and this was incredibly helpful in the way I think about everything from web site navigation to how someone interacts with a brochure. Donald Norman is an excellent author and provides a detailed, but light-hearted approach to the topic. Don't expect to find specific modern media examples, but instead, you'll find principles to guide designing everything from web sites to nuclear power plants.

This is more of a popular book than scholarly. It is not a reference. However, the message goes far beyond every day things. It is a message about physical, mental and organizational systems and how humans people interact with systems. I link this to Simons and Chablis, "The Invisible Gorilla" and Reason, J. "Human Error." All four authors are cognitive psychologists whose research and knowledge of research show that human brains function well in certain ways and not so well in others. Thus, anything we use, be it physical or cognitive, can be designed to maximize or interfere with effective and efficent usage. This isn't just stupid, dysfunctional object design, like the picture on the cover. Once you learn Reason's error model and Norman's observations you begin to see how objects and processes set us up for error and failure.

I was confused when I first ordered because this book appeared to be a different book from The DESIGN of Everyday Things, but they are, in fact, the same book, just different editions. The title was changed mostly for marketing reasons, as the author explains in the preface of the other one. I ended up reading the other book and sending this one back, but I would recommend either. This one is hard back, and I kept the other because it's paperback.

As someone with no previous design experience, this book as vastly enhanced my awareness of UI/UX and has endowed me with some diction with which to describe design decisions. Also some bomb futurism in the last 20 or so pages!

For anyone working or interested in design this book serves as a good, solid foundation. You'll reference the book a lot when referring to design. The end seemed to lose its focus a bit, but overall it's a very solid, thorough, and practical read.