The Design of Everyday Things
Reference Information
Title: Design of Everyday Things
Author: Donald Norman
Summary:
This book is about how devices are designed, and how they should be designed. Norman discusses how poorly designed things are today, and some key points to incorporate when creating a well designed product. One of them is to keep things simple. The more complex something is, the harder it is to learn it, and the less universal it is. What may be obvious to some users, is not even though of by other users. Another key idea is to provide feedback to the users. If there is no feedback, then the user doesn't know if what they are doing is correct or not. These ideas are included with others like keeping controls visible to produce the concept of a well designed product. The designer needs to keep in mind that all users are different when designing a product as well.
Discussion:
Towards the beginning of the book, I was interested, but I soon felt like i was reading the same thing over and over. I usually don't worry about the end design when I am creating new software, but I think that this book has shown me some new ideas. Most importantly that I need to think more about the end user rather than just developing code.
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