#designofeverydaythings

There’s a chat thread from back in 2012 where a friend first mentioned Design of Everyday Things to me. At some point, I acquired a physical copy of the book, and then promptly forgot about it, leaving it to languish in a stack of “stuff to read someday” and dragging it from apartment to apartment.

It was in a still-unpacked box of books when I dug it out a few weeks ago, after seeing the title come up in multiple UX book recommendation lists. Happily, and frugally, I decided to make it one of the first books I read during this learning phase.

Fun thing I learned in the preface: DoET was originally published in 1988 as Psychology of Everyday Things, which Don Norman quickly discovered was the wrong title.

“Readers interested in design would never think of looking in the psychology section… In titling my book, I had been guilty of the same shortsightedness that leads to all those unusable everyday things! My first choice of title was that of a self-centered designer, choosing the solution that pleased me without considering its impact upon readers.” That’s one user-research practice applied.

The reason this book is a classic is clear - so many of its lessons are just basic logic well dissected and applied. Yet I get the sense from reading the book that back when it was first written, creators didn’t have the kind of practice that we now do for addressing common usability issues. That’s not to say I didn’t appreciate the logic being broken down, but I feel like maybe this book has already proven to be a success, if many of its lessons are now integrated into best practices for product and user experience design. Or I just live in a bubble where I’ve been lucky enough to be exposed to this knowledge already! Between the game industry and user experience design as a whole, it’s possible that the important takeaways have already been disseminated.

That said, of course there were key points and memorable lessons I wanted to note. How about three?

Affordances and Constraints Should Be Clear

The classic example from the book about affordances is the one about opening doors -- when a door only swings open in one direction, each side should indicate whether it is pushed or pulled, as well as where the ‘hinge’ lays. Failure to properly design a door to instruct the user ends up trapping unwitting users, or at the very least causing an embarassing “Do I push? Oh no, I guess I pull” situation. The door to my massage therapists’ office is like this -- and I STILL don’t know which way to push the door in order to get in.

Norman also talks about stages of action in the mental model of how users interact -- what the specific steps are that users take in order to set an intention for what they want to happen, then execute those actions. He also points out the gulf of execution (“Does the system provide actions that correspond to the intentions of the person?”) and the gulf of evaluation (“Does the system provide a physical representation that can be directly perceived and that is directly interpretable in terms of the intentions and expectations of the person”?).

For me, the takeaway is that we should be careful to map actions not to what we know the system is capable of, but rather to what actions the user wants to achieve. I’m reminded of web interfaces for some freelance clients I’ve worked with, which started off very focused on tasks that mapped heavily to engineering feats they’d performed in the backend (image matching algorithms, for example). The initial results were that the user interface was clunky and didn’t do a great job fulfilling user needs, since it was designed with the backend in mind. Subsequent revisions to better address users’ interaction with the tech helped make the interfaces more reasonable and usable.

  Design Actively Explorable Systems

When there are multiple branches of options or some infinite number of possibilities for a user to take in order to interact with a system (a computer, or a game), the options and affordances have to be clear. Norman also made the point to note that actions should be without cost -- “When an action has an undesirable result, it must be readily reversible.” This is where those confirmation dialogs pop up.

I saw a lot of game design fundamentals in this discussion -- we create tutorials and first-run experiences that hand-hold the user through her first interactions with the system and teach them what they need to know about the rules in order to continue on their own. I also know that the less we have to teach, the better the experience (both as a beginning user, who wants to get into the meat of the game, and as a continued user, who wants to have a consistent and cohesive experience).

There was also one line that stuck out to me despite not having much to back it up - “... there exists great potential to make visible what should be visible (and to keep hidden what is irrelevant).” The phrase in the parentheses is what I thought was important -- sometimes information for the sake of information hinders instead of helping. I think about trying not to overwhelm users with information, especially if there’s nothing direct or affordable that they can do to change it.

  Using Mental Power for Good/Effectiveness

There was a section that I read in DoET that reminded me of what Design for Engagement said about information -- make sure you are cognizant of what is being asked of the user and be careful not to overtax their capacity. In this book, it’s discussed as Knowledge in the World vs. Knowledge in the Head.

Knowledge in the World consists of things like normal mapping (turning a knob left to indicate moving left), memory/associations and physical indications of an object’s affordance. This makes me think about what people think when confronted with a new situation that looks similar to another situation they’ve encountered -- my guess is that they’re likely to react the same way, even if they’ve never seen the New Thing. So, designing an object to intentionally resemble something familiar can net benefits if there are desired behaviors you want to inherit, but maybe not so good if there are connotations/actions that aren’t desired. We think a lot about how the Wavo egg shape is good because it’s familiar, organic and is held easily, but what if people take away other ‘egg’ qualities, like fragility? Things to ponder.

Knowledge in the Head can be more efficient since it might come “naturally” to some users. People can easily remember things like explanations of functionality (cause and effect) and relationships between objects, and that knowledge can be used to evaluate a situation without additional World-Knowledge. Here, I think about how easily the Wii Sports games caught on with both younger and older audiences -- the idea of treating this object like a [insert sports paraphernalia] baseball bat, tennis racket, golf club, etc. came easily because those actions were already familiar to even first-time players of the game.

  Design of Everyday Play

I started to think about what the term “everyday things” meant when I first outlined this piece. Some things clearly fall into the “everyday” category -- door knobs, faucets, coffee makers, cars. Other cases mentioned in the book included things that were “everyday” for a subset of the population -- flight controls for an airplane, gauges and sensors for nuclear plants.

Where do games and toys fall though? Part of the joy in play comes from the unexpected, and oftentimes that unexpected result isn’t reached by “forming a mental model of how to get to that state and then executing.” Play is in discovery and experimentation, in testing out a system that is unknown but kind and supportive (so, a lot of encouraging active exploration, but maybe a lot less knowledge in the head/world, a little less clear constraints, at least in the beginning). So maybe there’s a Design of Playful Things book to be written in the future, deconstruction how to design games and playful experiences not as a set of tools or rules, but rather as ways to gently encourage players to explore and nudge them into interesting states.

In short -- enjoyed the chance to finally read a book that’s been sitting in my collection for a while, whose learnings have slowly seeped into design consciousness over time. As an aside, Design of Everyday Things also makes me think about Clifford Nass's The Man Who Lied to His Laptop -- connected but scratching on the surface of how we relate ourselves to the things around us, and how our behaviors towards them reveal fundamentals about humanity. Makes me want to go pick up that book again too.