The Design of Everyday Things

Absolute bible, love Don Norman!

'Design of Everyday Things' to first have sympathy with the users.

The Remembrance of Earth's Past has been on my list for some time now. Will you be finishing that trilogy? Actively reading: - Mistborn : Final Empire (~90% finished ding) - 3rd novella in The Murderbot Diaries - Dive into Design Patterns - Fullstack D3 and Data Viz Passively reading: - The Design of everyday things (I don't think I will ever finish this book) - Bhagavad-Gita as it is - LOTR (mostly a re-read)

Seconding this. It's an important book for all kinds of design I would also recommend "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" by Robert C. Martin. It focuses on crafting higher quality code, which is the property of it not only running well, but being easy to understand and to work on

The Design Of Everyday Things by Don Norman might be something of interest https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/840

Yeah, seconded. Still on my shelf after 25 years and I still occasionally dip into it.

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. It had a huge impact on the way I view UX issues, and the relationship between users & developers/companies, and I prioritize users' "dumb questions" way differently now as a result. It's also made me feel less bad about times that I have a problem with using some piece of software, whether it's a settings menu that I can't find what I need in it, or some complex setup process.

> Frontend software / design. The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman. Also in FE/UX. Came here to say exactly this. I've heard of this book so many times, and have tried to read it many times, but just can never quite finish it (too many anecdotes for me, vs something like https://www.refactoringui.com/) > It's incredible the number of people who use the words "affordance" and "signifier" incorrectly. I wish the UX world used less jargon. It's such a cross-domain concern involving developers, designers, researchers, users, owners, managers, etc., that using plain English is IMO usually a better way to get a point across.

The Design of Everyday Things can be a bit of a drag, and it's just my hunch that not many folks bother to read it all the way through.

+1 for the Norman book. A bit verbose, but in the end worth it. Krug's "Don't Make Me Think", while more UI / UX is a solid compliment to "Everyday Things."

> Code Complete by Steve McConnell +1. Also, Rapid Development, by McConnell[0]. I would say that it's even better than Code Complete. It would be considered "quaint," these days, but Writing Solid Code[1], by Steve Maguire, was a seminal book in my education. I still use many of the techniques he mentioned. And I cannot say enough about The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman[2]. That book changed my life. I would consider it required reading, for anyone that develops anything that will be used by other humans. [0] https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/rapid-development-... (https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/rapid-development-9780735691490) [1] https://writingsolidcode.com [2] https://jnd.org/the-design-of-everyday-things-revised-and-ex... (https://jnd.org/the-design-of-everyday-things-revised-and-expanded-edition/)

The Design of Everyday Things. It really changed how I view software (or any product) as just a tool to help people.

Not my fields but. The Armchair Economist by Steven Landsburg for economics. The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman for design in any aspect. Closer to my field of organisational performance/psychology. The Fearless Organisation by Amy C Edmondson.

The Design of Everyday Things.

“The Design of Everyday Things”. The book that sparked a change in my career (to be honest) In programming, the analogous problem is API design: taking whatever data structures are used by a software tool internally, and figuring out how to present them to external programmers in a useful, intelligible way. If there’s a mismatch between the internal structure of the system and the structure of what-users-want, then it’s the API designer’s job to translate. A “good” API is one which handles the translation well. User interface design is a more general version of the same problem: take whatever structures are used by a tool internally, and figure out how to present them to external users in a useful, intelligible way. Conceptually, the only difference from API design is that we no longer assume our users are programmers interacting with the tool via code. We design the interface to fit however people use it - that could mean handles on doors, or buttons and icons in a mobile app, or the temperature knobs on a fridge.

Books, concepts, and mindsets that help build the right thing. Problem solving, design, design thinking, consulting resources. "The Complete Problem Solver", "Change by Design", "The Design of Everyday Things", "Jobs to Be Done", concepts like non-consumption. Questions that confirm that feature requests are valid and avoid solving Y problem when the actual problem is X. Thought processes to prioritize work and focus on what matters. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26814150 Then books, concepts, and mindsets that help software engineers reap the reward of the software they write. Marketing, sales, prospecting, pricing, communication. I believe there is a huge quantity of beautiful, idiomatic, code that solves no real problem, and a huge number of software engineers who have trouble monetizing their skill, or get stuck in unfulfilling roles because they have not found a way to shape an interesting one for themselves. A few examples of threads searching for answers one usually answers through piecing together many resources, books, and life experiences: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26805216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26650563…

Yep, I second this. Don Norman really and truly understood the user in the deepest way. It’s hard to find people like him who put their entire consciousness in the shoes of the user, simulate what the user goes through when interacting with the world and provide insights about how, we the designers, on the opposite aisle think about design as not some aesthetic shit but as a tool to solve problems. Design and designers, vast majority of them are chasing aesthetics and trends. Just go on Behance to see it for yourself.

Don Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Thing... (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things)). Yes, API design has its own gotchas and specific practices—but some of the best (and worst) APIs I’ve ever interacted with were good (or bad) for the same reasons any kind of design can be good ( or bad): affordances, feedback, coherent conceptual models, and so on.

The Design of Everyday Things Ways of Seeing The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

There's an audiobook version of "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman. The book per se doesn't have much to do with programming per se (at least directly), but Norman describes a couple of mechanisms how humans interact with tools and describes some simple formalisms around them. I personally believe that it's a very useful book to have read (or listened to) if you're going to write any software that humans interact with -- be it UI driven or APIs.

The first time I tried to read this book after Luke Kanies the founder of Puppet recommended it I barely made it 15% in, but after 6 months of noticing poor design everywhere I went back and gave it another go. I'm not in UX but I think about this book almost daily.

I didn't think it was that great. It was interesting, but a bit repetitive and a bit too long.

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. Fantastic book that makes you realize how poorly designed many things in our lives are.

I can attest to those two books being fantastic resources on UI/UX design. They're the only two books I've read on the matter and I'm consistently praised as one of the more user experience focused engineers in any team I work on. Although, I can't walk through half the doors in the world it seems without going "why the hell does this pull door have a push handle!!", so there is that side effect.

Design of Everyday Things is great. I even had my Software Engineering students read excepts this semester.

The Design of Everyday Things Is a masterpiece. The age of the book proves it. It is as relevant today as it was when written 30 years ago. The only downside to the book is it will ruin every elevator, door handle and stereo amplifier you ever use. My wife tires of me explaining how a door that requires a “pull” sign is a major UX fail. After reading the book it helped me understand the different models the creator and user have and has allowed me to recognize when I’m making design decisions that make a lot of sense to the creator and no sense to the user.

Reading "The Design of Everyday Things" will give you a sense of the basics -- After that try learning a popular frontend-web framework (like Bootstrap / Foundation) which follows lot of the industry-standard UI practices out-of-the-box. Also checkout things like WAI-ARIA / WCAG, which outline accessibility standards on the web.

I’ve read (and love) his book and enjoy thinking about function and design. I think there’s a risk of designing at the expense of joy and beauty though, and Don Norman seems to have qualified his position post-The Design of Everyday Things in a TED Talk[0]. I think it’s worthwhile watching. [0] https://www.ted.com/talks/don_norman_on_design_and_emotion/u... (https://www.ted.com/talks/don_norman_on_design_and_emotion/up-next)

Don Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things has indeed altered how I look at the world from a design perspective. It teaches you design awareness, and you'll find yourself noticing and understanding design elements all around you, that you didn't before. Even though it might seem a little old, the information presented in there is timeless, so I highly recommend it as well. It is in fact the first book I would suggest to anyone wanting to learn how to think like a designer. I recently got his other book, Emotional Design, I just haven't gotten to it yet.

I don’t teach UX design, but if I did, Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things would be the first assigned reading. I’ve even recommended it to friends who aren’t looking to transition into design, but just want a better understanding of the discipline for the occasional departmental web page, etc. If you want to focus on visual language, iconography, and how graphics communicate, an unconventional, yet highly-regarded choice is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. What Norman does for interaction, McCloud does for visual communication (and does so, appropriately, in the form of a comic book).

Design of Everyday Things & Don't Make Me Think are both likely to be in your employer's library, or on a co-worker's shelf. Not quite free, but I bet you can find a hard-copy to borrow.

(For background, I'm a faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute) For best books, it depends on if you want to understand users or do implementation. But generally, I'd highly recommend Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things to improve how you look at the world, and Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think for simple and practical design tips. For tools, the best is paper prototyping, where you have your team just draw it out on paper and simulate the UI. It's simple, fast, and cheap, and from a cognitive perspective, you can explore more of the design space (think breadth-first search instead of depth-first), and you don't get overly attached to your designs. In my course on UX design, we also use Balsamiq and InVision, though other tools seem fine (e.g. Marvel, Figma, etc). One of our alums created this great chart comparing different prototyping tools: https://www.cooper.com/prototyping-tools For schools, some to check out would be Georgia Tech, University of Washington's Master's of HCI, Indiana University, University of Michigan iSchool, and (of course) Carnegie Mellon's Master's of HCI.…

Sorry for the wall of text. 1. Bourne (The language and world of this novel are extraordinary - everything is falling apart yet brimming with life. Strangely moving) 2. The Design of Everyday things (Essential for anyone in UI/UX) 3. All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries (Highly engaging, entertaining sci-fi novella series, from an author that can write a very decent robot protagonist) 4. The Power (Interesting story with sci-fi elements on the dynamics of power, sex, and gender roles. I didn't care for the book, but the first 3/4 of the book are amazing) 5. Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days 6. 7 brief Lessons on Physics 7. The Last Lecture (The energy and positivity coming from a man knowing he's about to die is infectious. Great read) 8. A wizard of Earthsea (Move over Harry Potter, this is the essential children's story about wizards) 9. Exploring diabetes with owls (Funny, irreverent) 10. Miss Peregrines home for peculiar children (Made an effort to read more YA this year - this was the best in this series, but I still hated it. There's a host of better YA series out there.) 11. A Wizard of Earthsea: The Tombs of Atuan (See 8.)…

Here are the best books I've read over the last few months: - Lost and Founder - the founder of Moz shares his advice and experience from building a 40M/year company. I found the things he says about building a startup extremely insightful and practically useful. Reading it feels like having a dinner with a friend who shares with you the things he has learned in a very honest, down to earth way. Highly recommend it. - Rationality from AI to Zombies - probably the most influential book I've read in my life, profoundly changed the way I think. It's a collection of LessWrong essays on science and rationality. (recently they've released an an audio version by the way). - "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and "Our Mathematical Universe" - two general popular science books I'm enjoying a lot. Haven't finished reading them yet, but so far they're brilliant(and very easy to understand, authors do an amazing job explaining complicated things in a simple, accessible way).…

My favorites so far: - Pragmatic Thinking & Learning by Andy Hunt - The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman - The Effective Engineer* by Edmond Lau - The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas - SQL Performance Explained by Markus Winand And http://teachyourselfcs.com curriculum is pretty good as well. As a side note, there's so much we can learn from game programmers and OS/database/compiler engineers.

Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug and The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. While they're not strictly software or programming related, I really like the concepts of making interfaces that require minimal thought to use and empathizing with your users. I've seen an unfortunate amount of "programming machismo" where a confusing or poorly engineered system is used and accepted because "that's just how things work in the real world". And whenever someone struggles with the process, it's obviously because they're wrong, not the system. But more often than not, if more than one person has trouble understanding your system, whether it's an API, a website, a build process, the design is the issue.

Working Effectively with legacy code (http://amzn.to/2CazEm5) and The Design of Everyday Things ( http://amzn.to/2H23a0R ) Both have a huge impact on how I work with code and design them. Trying to explain these concepts are hard without context. Sometimes i just copy/paste the sections i think they could benefit from.

Franz de Waal's "Chimpanzee Politics". It's nominally about the social relationships of a chimp colony in a Dutch zoo. But it made me see the extent to which humans are just another great ape, and a lot of human dynamics are really primate dynamics, especially around social power. Johnstone's "Impro". It's about improvisational theater, and mainly meant for people learning improv. But the section on status transactions helped me see a lot about how we express those primate dominance dynamics. There's also great material on the nature of creativity. "Getting to Yes" is a great book about business negotiation, but is lessons about shifting discussions from zero-sum to positive-sum are things I use a lot. Braitenberg's "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" is a way of thinking about psychology (and our inference of mind) by examining imaginary robots. "The Toyota Way" and other books on Lean Manufacturing are about running extremely effective manufacturing operations. But they have deeply changed how I think about systems of making software and running businesses. Other great books in this category include "Toyota Kata" and "Principles of Product Development Flow".…

This is exactly the kind of book I had in mind when I posted the question. It's scary how often I think about it, especially when going through doors.

Don Norman - The Design of Everyday Things

+1 The Design of Everyday Things. I believe this is a must read for anyone creating something for other people. I'm definitely a better designer because of it.

Beware, though, as it may lead you to get unreasonably upset every time you encounter a misleading door handle.

Design of everyday object is really great and I cannot recommend it enough. Udacity also has a mooc that follows the book and is taught by the author https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-the-design-of-everyd... (https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-the-design-of-everyday-things--design101)

My favorites are the classic "The Design of Everyday Things" and "Microinteractions" (http://microinteractions.com/about-the-book/).

"The Design of Everyday Things" is a classic.

I too have been recommending this book quite a bit for new UI developers.

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman This should be a required reading for anyone who does UI design. It helps explain why items you interact with subconsciously frustrate you and why product simplicity is typically better than more features.

I'm going to take the pretentious and predictable* route here and recommend The Design of Everyday Things. It's not about REST APIs or whatever particular instance you're after, but it is more philosophical about what APIs are. *Like a freshman preaching Rand

Older Stuff: The Bible/Quran, The Republic (Plato), The Social Contract (Rousseau), Tao Te Ching (Laozi), Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides) Newer Stuff: Nine Stories (Salinger), The Razor's Edge (Maugham), Nausea (Sartre), Siddartha (Hesse), Road to Serfdom (Hayek), The Book (Watts), Design of Everyday Things (Norman), Atlas Shrugged (Rand), Invisible Man (Ellison), Debunking Economics (Keen), Blood Meridian (McCarthy), The Center Cannot Hold (Saks), This Time Is Different (Reinhart/Rogoff), Infinite Jest (Wallace), Calvin and Hobbes (Watterson) All of these books are well written and have given me some perspective on interesting people/situations/ways of thinking.

The Design of Everyday Things. Probably the quintessential book on design, the basic premise is that if you can't figure out how a thing works, it's not your fault. Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down. About the engineering of various things, mostly buildings. Highly recommend. The Elements of Computer Systems (better known as NAND to Tetris). Describes a computer from the bottom up. A History of the Arab Peoples The Quran The Bible Space and Time in General Relativity by David Mermin Feynman QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

"The design of Everyday things" Donald A. Normann

Coders at work The numbers behind Numb3rs Statistical methods in counterterrorism Total recall (the biography by Schwarzenegger) From dictatorship to democracy (available for free here: http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations98ce.html) The miracle of mindfulness The design of everyday things Escape from camp 14

Without a doubt. The big takeaway from the book is that when you encounter something that's hard to use, it's not your fault for not knowing how to use it. It's the thing's fault for being badly designed. Read this book.

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. It talks about good and bad design in everyday objects through lots of enlightening and amusing stories and examples (doors that look like you should push them but you actually have to pull, mixing boards with dozens of identical knobs, aircraft software that hides important state information, etc). It provides some interesting insights from cognitive science and psychology too. It definitely made me a lot more conscious of how I went about making things that people would use and how those things could effectively communicate through their design what should be done with them. This also had an impact into how I went about communicating in general. http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d... (http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/0385267746)

Here's a few I've really liked that have a broader subject matter than only what you asked for. I figure that if you like to read you'd like these books. --- NON-FICTION --- Darkness Visible A Mathemematician's Apology Omnivore's Dilemma Fermat's Enigma The Code Book Born to Run Judgement of Paris Siddhartha Killing Pablo The Victorian Internet Lone Survivor I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman Papillon Into Thin Air Born on a Blue Day Touching the Void Got Fight The Conquest of Happiness --- FICTION --- Switch Bitch Lost Horizon The Cuckoo's Egg The Simlarillion The Time Traveler's Wife The Alchemist The Count of Monte Cristo A Canticle for Leibowitz Neverwhere My Uncle Oswald Stories of Your Life and Others Invisible Cities Life of Pi Atlas Shrugged --- WALL STREET / FINANCE --- When Genius Failed Liar's Poker Buffett (Lowenstein) Bull! Black-Scholes and Beyond (textbook) Fixed Income Securities (textbook) The Road to Serfdom The Smartest Guys in the Room Fortune's Formula The Fourth Turning Inside the House of Money --- ENTREPRENEURSHIP / COMPUTERS (non-textbook) --- Masters of Doom It's Not About the Bike Dot. Bomb Founders at Work The PayPal Wars…

Trying to confine myself to books I haven't seen others mention: "Guns, Votes, and Democracy" is a wonderful book about democracy in the third world and is both insightful and surprisingly readable. "The Retreat to Commitment" is the only philosophy book I'd actually recommend. "The Design of Everyday Things" is a book for anyone who makes or uses things. "The Transparent Society" is a thought provoking book on the future of privacy. "The Mystery of Capital" is a book on the importance of non-corrupt government in successful capitalism, a good point of view to have in addition to Rand. "The Strategy of Conflict" on how to use game theory in the real world, and negotiations especially.

The Design Of Everyday Things (mentioned above as well) is one of my favourite design books. But will reading books help? What is your intent in suggesting such books to them?

* The Pragmatic Programmer * Becoming a Technical Leader * In Search of Stupidity * Hackers & Painters * Blockbusters * Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity * The Best Software Writing I * Behind Closed Doors * Managing Humans * The Mythical Man-Month * Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams * The Non-Designers Design Book * Founders at Work * Good to Great * Dreaming in Code * The Art of the Start * Maverick * The Design of Everyday Things * The Art of Project Management * The Art of Innovation

Without a doubt, Heidegger's explanation of readiness-to-hand in Being and Time has done more for my usability and process inefficiency evaluating skills than even Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things or any HCI book I've ever read. While Norman's book comes in a strong second, the benefit of the first few chapters of Being and Time is the incredibly low-level cognitive access it gives you to the work your brain does when engaged in a task. (If you're interested and don't mind slogging through some tough writing, pick up the hardcover version and Dreyfus' Being-in-the-World and read them together. Reading a Wikipedia article or some other summary fails to deliver the same degree of low-level access.) I'll also mention Ayn Rand as someone who wrote inspiringly about the entrepreneur as a (potentially) heroic figure, but hasten to add that her sociology of looters and movers is way too simplistic to ground some of her views on ethics. John Stuart Mill's "Utilitarianism" was my first assigned reading in a political philosophy class, and remains my favorite.…

I recommend "The Design of Everyday Things" (formely "The Psychology of Everyday Things") by Donald Norman. It's kind of dated and it's focused on product design, but it has some very good ideas about making products that are easy to use and understand.

-Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary -The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman -UNIX in a Nutshell (O'Reilly book written by Arnold Robbins)

The Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman I know he's gotten some flak lately for ripping on 37signals, but this book seriously changed how I look at the world... especially doors. Freakonomics - Steven Levitt Good for understanding the value of taking another perspective.

This is a great book. It delves into the psychology of how we think about and use the built world and explains why some things are simply hard to use as compared to other, better designed things.

The Design of Everyday Things