What I Have Learned From Don Norman's Book: “The Design Of Everyday Things”
In the early year of my learning journey in the design industry, I read a lot of articles about design itself. Many of them are the basics of UI and UX, design principles, case studies, design patterns, laws of UX, and many more. During that time, I found many articles that bring on the topic of Design Principles, especially from the book called The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.
They said that this book is the best book for everyone to start learning design. It will open your mind to see the design in our daily life, not only in digital products like nowadays. I proved it when I read that book. Don Norman, mainly talked about objects that we use regularly, such as doors, water faucets, steering wheels, gear, and many more. The book indicates that Product Design is everywhere! That’s why even though this book was published more than 30 years ago, this book is still relevant in this modern era and still read by many designers around the world.
After reading this book in 2020 (yes, it had been two years since I read this book but I just can manage to write this article now haha) Don Norman made me realize that it’s not our fault when we can’t use some objects on a daily basis. For almost my entire life, I always thought that my inability to operate something or to figure out how to use physical objects was my fault. I thought that I wasn’t capable enough to overcome those problems.
However, Don Norman in his book said that it’s the responsibility of designers to figure out how to put their knowledge about how to use the product within the product itself.
“It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people.” — page 22, Google playbook version
“As I watched people struggle with technology, it became clear that the difficulties were caused by the technology (product), not the people (user).” — page 22, Google playbook version
From his statement in the book, we can conclude that all the users’ problems when they’re interacting with a product are our responsibilities as designers, researchers, and all product people to fix those problems. Alas, we can say that users are never wrong but us (product people).
Even when I joined the webinar UX Research from kak Luky Primadany in 2020 (you can watch the recording here) she corrected the way the presenter in defining the problems in her research report and to not blame users when they couldn’t finish the task scenario properly. Even though there are no significant differences between the lines and I’m pretty sure that we could still get the same problem from the report. Let me show you an example;
The way in defining the problems;
Blaming users: “Users was always failed when creating e-wallet” ❌
Blaming the product: “The process in creating e-wallet wasn’t intuitive” ✅
See the difference? the first line sounds like it was the users’ fault for not being able in performing the task. Meanwhile, the second line was the better one when we want to define the problems. The reason this problem occurred was because of the lack of understanding of people in that product so the process and the experience were also affected to users’ performance. Even between those lines, we could still address the same problem to fix which is the flow/process of creating an e-wallet on that product, it’s still important to define the validated problems in a proper way, that’s the problem is in the product not in the users.
Don Norman also said that two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.
Discoverability: is it possible to even figure out what actions are possible and where and how to perform them?
Understanding: What does it all mean? How is the product supposed to be used? What do all the different controls and settings mean?
The relevant components in a product must be visible, and they must communicate the correct message: What actions are possible? Where and how should they be done? I think this will bring good user performance when they’re interacting with our product.
When I read this book, I also got a new perspective on how we teach our users to use our product. As we know that many products give us such an instruction to use them. For example; a guided tour on a website or a mobile application. When we used a digital product for the first time, we regularly see it immediately after we registered ourselves, especially on the homepage.
Like this;
However, Don Norman through his book once again said that there’s no label needed to explain how to use a product/object because it’s a natural signal, naturally interpreted, and has to make it easy just to know what to do.
“Whenever you see hand-lettered signs pasted on doors, switches, or products, trying to explain how to work them, what to do and what not to do, you are also looking at poor design.” — Don Norman
A device is easy to use when the set of possible actions is visible. In other words, good design takes careful planning, thought, and an understanding of how people behave. This means, as designers we need to think of every edge cases in our product as detailed as possible. I know this is not an easy job, actually it’s hard to do. Sometimes, we still couldn’t cover every detail of it and even though we did it, we would still face other challenges such as; tech possibilities and stakeholders' concerns.
I didn’t say that every products who have such a guided tour or instructions on their page are a poor design. Because if that is so, then almost every product we use is a poor design. There are so many products/objects both digital and not have this kind of thing. Actually, I was ever designed this thing as well to make sure our users understand how to use the feature. Furthermore, as far as I knew not every guided tour existed because of the lack of understanding of people in that product. It happened just because the designer want to give the possible best experience to their users and didn’t want them lost while using the product so they teach them first.
In an addition, I will share some of Don Norman’s advice from this book with all designers and researchers who are reading this:
- Don’t blame people when they fail to use your products properly,
- Take people’s difficulties as signifiers of where the product can be improved,
- Eliminate all error messages from your digital product. Instead, provide help and guidance,
- Make it possible to correct problems directly from help and guidance message. Allow people to continue with their task: Don’t impede progress, help in making it smooth and continuous. Never make people start over,
- Assume that what people have done is partially correct, so if it is inappropriate, provide the guidance that allows them to correct the problem and be on their way.
- Think positively, for yourself and for the people you interact with.
That’s it. This is what I have learned from this book. It’s mainly about a mindset that we need to keep to be able to design a good product. Actually, there are still other things that I also learned from this book. It is Don Norman’s seven design principles. But since there were already many articles talking about this, I will skip this part. You just can search for it on Google.
Last but not least, thank you so much for reading this article. Best of luck to all of us! ✌🏻
