The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman

The Design of Every Day Things, DOET, by Donald Norman, is a book focused on the inadequacies and poor design of every day things such as doors, pens, computers, and the like.  He goes into very detailed analysis of many of the things that we use daily and take mostly for granted.

For example Norman finds a great fault in the every day light switch based on its lack of a natural mapping to the lights they control.  The lights, placed on a horizontal plane, don't coincide with the switches which are arranged on a vertical plane.  This lack of natural mapping, Norman argues, leads to a great deal of confusion and headache for the user.  Norman even goes so far as to redo the switches in his university lab to make them horizontal as the lights are.

Most of the problems he comes up with however are by and large small inconveniences to life.  During the book he rambles on and complains so much at times that it makes him seem neurotic.  Many of his complaints don't even seem valid.  At one point in the book Norman complains about computers and a particular computer that he used which wouldn't display the characters on the screen as they were typed.  He argues that this was bad design and it caused many errors.  In truth this is a less than desirable feature and it most likely did cause many errors however this was clearly not part of the design.  When the book was written personal computers had just begun to take hold and they were very slow.  The hardware constraints placed on the designer would have kept him or her from making the computer display characters in real time, not the design. 

While Norman does make many good points throughout the book, for about two thirds of the book it just feels very whiny.  He makes reference to so many bad design but in the entire 200 pages of the book devotes only about 5 pages to mention how the design process could be changed to result in better designs.  It felt as if he was completely ignoring the economics pressures put on designers to rush out products to help the bottom line of the business.  One of the better designs he speaks about is the early telephone but he fails to recognize that in the early days of the telephone, Bell had a monopoly allowing them to take their time with products and not rush them out to beat there competition, something that designers simply cannot do today.

The book would have been more enjoyable if it were about a third of its current length.  As stated earlier a lot of the book felt whiny and there was too much complaining.  More time should have been put into how to fix the errors and less into repetition on why certain designs were bad.