Book Blog, "Design of Everyday Things"

Summary
Design of Everyday Things is Dr. Donald Norman's book, dating from 1988. In it, he outlines examples of what he considers good and bad designs, then explains some of the principles that make it so. The chapters are as follows:
*Chapter 1: Unnecessary complexity, how it happens, how to avoid it.
*Chapter 2: The assignment of blame, usually too much to the user, and too little to the design.
*Chapter 3: Information storage, esp. how design cues can be used to make this easier.
*Chapter 4: Reasonable constraints. That is, how designs can be made more intuitive by limiting the number of actions possible at each step.
*Chapter 5: Categories & causes of errors. Includes forcing functions, which are like constraints but more so.
*Chapter 6: Why bad design decisions are made.
*Chapter 7: How designs will look in the future.

Discussion
Design of Everyday Things was one of those books that gets less interesting the more you read it. There are a couple reasons for this. First, Dr. Norman is essentially pointing out common sense things you never quite seem to see. While this is very valuable, and I am certainly glad I read this book, once you've picked up on his theme it's relatively easy to extrapolate; you know what'll he say before he actually gets around to saying it. Second, there is a high level of repetition between chapters. He makes variations on the same points over and over again, and each is less valuable and less interesting the seventh time around.

Still, as I said, Design of Everyday Things was mostly easy to read, definitely easy to understand, and contained a lot of good information which I should be able to put to good use. If I had to suggest one thing that would make the book more fun for me, it would to spend more time on examples and less on explaining them, but that's at least as much just my personality as anything with the book. I'm the kind of guy who likes to draw his own conclusions.

The mixture of half good predictions, half "it's still the 80s" in the last chapter reminded me of this book.

Picture from amazon.com via GIS.