From the library
Don Norman, 1988
In one paragraph
Norman's case that when people fail to use something, the fault is the design rather than the user. Affordances, signifiers, mapping and feedback give you a vocabulary for why a door, a stove or an interface defeats people. Most useful for anyone designing something others must operate without instruction, which now includes most processes. Least useful if you want current practice; the examples are decades old even in the revised edition.
Where this sits in the operating system
Continuous Improvement & Feedback Loops
Continuous Improvement & Feedback Loops
Systems Over Goals
Systems Over Goals
Key insights
When people fail to use something, the design failed, not the user. That reversal is the whole book.
Affordances and signifiers: what an object makes possible, and what communicates that possibility. Most confusion is a missing signifier.
Feedback and mapping determine whether a system is learnable. Both are usually the first thing cut.
Recognise it early
The failure and the correction sit side by side deliberately. Read the left column asking whether any of it is already true of you.
Hidden affordances
Unnatural mapping
Poor feedback
Model mismatch
No recovery
The same idea, argued differently
Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer
James Clear
Julie Zhuo
Masaaki Imai
The full breakdown
Before you close this
Naming the specific moment you will act roughly doubles the odds you do.
Reference
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