The Design of Everyday Things
Donald A. Norman
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.”
“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible,”
“Principles of design: 1. Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head. 2. Simplify the structure of tasks. 3. Make things visible: bridge gulfs between Execution and Evaluation. 4. Get the mappings right. 5. Exploit the power of constraints. 6. Design for error. 7. When all else fails, standardize.”
“Rule of thumb: if you think something is clever and sophisticated beware-it is probably self-indulgence.”
“A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem.”
“The idea that a person is at fault when something goes wrong is deeply entrenched in society. That’s why we blame others and even ourselves. Unfortunately, the idea that a person is at fault is imbedded in the legal system. When major accidents occur, official courts of inquiry are set up to assess the blame. More and more often the blame is attributed to “human error.” The person involved can be fined, punished, or fired. Maybe training procedures are revised. The law rests comfortably. But in my experience, human error usually is a result of poor design: it should be called system error. Humans err continually; it is an intrinsic part of our nature. System design should take this into account. Pinning the blame on the person may be a comfortable way to proceed, but why was the system ever designed so that a single act by a single person could cause calamity? Worse, blaming the person without fixing the root, underlying cause does not fix the problem: the same error is likely to be repeated by someone else.”
“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.”
“Cognition attempts to make sense of the world: emotion assigns value.”
“The problem with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.”
“Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.”
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Book Keywords:
inspirational
