Book Reading #18: Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 6: The Design Challenge

The Design of Everyday Things

Donald A. Norman

Summary: In this chapter, Norman discusses the main challenges that design and designers face. He starts our by explaining the natural evolution of design, which is not always possible to obtain. Also, designers put the aesthetic goals before usability and effectiveness. Norman also notes that designers are not able do identify the flaws of their designs because they are not the typical users, they have worked on this design for so long that they think there is no ambiguity, etc. Also, the designer's clients are not the users of the designs, thus explaining the many factors that designers try to accomplish (marketability for example) before usability. Another problem is trying to design for everyone who can use a device, there are many special characteristics of users and one design alone cannot meet all expectations. Towards the end of the chapter, Norman focuses to the flaws and challenges on the design of computer systems.

Discussion: This chapter was extremely long, and I don't say it because of the reading load, but because Norman discusses so many ideas that it is difficult to summarize what the chapter was about in a short paragraph. I enjoyed reading the final part of the chapter where he focuses on the design of computer systems. I like how we are able to read and see connections between Norman's ideas and what we have read from the essays in HCI Remixed. The concept of "disappearing computers" shows up in this chapter as well, and Norman given a very specific example. Reading this chapter helped me better understand some of the previous readings.