The Psychology 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.

This is a fantastic book, that anyone who really wants to really understand our world should read. It is the small things that make the difference, and this book shows how the smallest, invisible decisions made by other can affect us, and that even with awareness of what would work better, we don't take the difficult choice of trying to do things differently

This book is amazing especially if your studying UX in college. Allot of terms in the book relate to what I'm studying in my class. Definitely gets me even more excited for my major and future career.

Bought this book because it was referenced so many times in Heim's textbook. Great read, flow is conversational and easy, while the concepts are still challenging. Norman has a gift for taking complex concepts and breaking them down into relatively easy to understand language.

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. :)

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.

Anyone who's interested in how the world around us is designed, from the position of door handles to menu options, should read this book! It's awesome! Especially helpful for user interface designers!

I found this book after watching YouTube videos of Dr. Norman. This book is an amazing extension of those videos. With its smart, crisp, and relevant writing, the book is a must-have for newbies looking to get into the HCI field and also for professionals looking for a review of the fundamentals.

For software developers...a good change from the norm

After reading many technical books and development theory books, this is a good break from the normal routine. This can help a developer step outside the box and look at development like the engineering of any thing that is used by people. Most of what is said applies to the developer whether designing user interfaces or object interfaces. Definitely worth a read.