19-March-2020 By Jeffrey Cooper
Book Recommendation: The Design of Everyday Things
I am passionate about the User Experience (UX). I am not a User Experience professional. However, most of us tend to know a good UX when we see one, and we certainly know a bad one when we experience it firsthand. I do take the tenets of a good UX into account when I look for innovative solutions. Frequently, one of the more innovative elements of these solutions is less required interaction with the User.
I know that when a concept is moved from a presentation to development, real, genuine UX people must be brought in to ensure that the final product is best for all users. Users are not just end users, but the people that install the system and the people that maintain and utilize the system on the business side- via dashboards, for example.
Don Norman’s book was recommended to me by a friend who is a User Experience engineer and passionate advocate. It is a long-standing classic that has been updated for the modern, mobile era. Don covers plenty of bad examples, and implores us to design a system to its usage is innate, so it is obvious to the user how it operates. He goes deep into the psychology of the Human Response, from how we interact with a system, segregating the conscious and subconscious aspects, to how we then perceive what we did, in reverse order. Human error, he says, is not the fault of the User, but one of the Designer.
It’s a fascinating and enlightening book. I recommend for anyone in design to read this book cover to cover.
Places to purchase:
- Apple: https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-design-of-everyday-things/id1209990641
- Google: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things_Revised_and_Expanded?id=nVQPAAAAQBAJ&hl=en_US
- Amazon: