The Design of Everyday Things

Donald Norman's best-selling plea for user-friendly design, with more than 175,000 copies sold to date, is now a Basic paperback.

First, businesses discovered quality as a key competitive edge; next came service. Now, Donald A. Norman, former Director of the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of California, reveals how smart design is the new competitive frontier. The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how--and why--some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them. more

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From: Amazon
Posted: Dec-23-2008

Poor Kindle edition

I got the Kindle edition of this book.Font is very hard to read and there is a lot of mangled words.Images in the book are unusable due the poor quality (too grainy).There are no navigational elements in this book. These are not essential but it would nice to have them. Especially for figures and...

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From: Amazon
Posted: Oct-15-2008

A Must Read for every Designer

As a human being we think we know other people and how they see and use products. This book tells many amusing anecdotes about products that were not successful because the designer made the things is a way he would have liked and not in the way real users use it. The book is written full of...

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From: Amazon
Posted: Oct-14-2008

Outdated, better books available

This book is a classic in the sense that it was once groundbreaking, in that it pointed out obvious flaws in industrial and software design. However, a lack of any updates outside of a new introduction leaves the book stale and dated. Complaints about the design of 1980s DOS software and VCRs is...

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From: Amazon
Posted: Sep-09-2008

One of the best books any designer could read

So often "design" books seem to go on about looks and "feel" yet only brush over the physiology of design. This book shows you how to think like a user, explorer like a user, error like a user and design for helping the user love your product.Anyone reading this book will instantly appreciate...

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From: Amazon
Posted: Aug-12-2008

It's OK - but how can this be the seminal book on usability...?

Having heard that this was the seminal work in usabiliy, my expectations were probably too high. Some of the principles laid out are indeed excellent and well illustrated. The structure of the book is - ironically - not crystal clear. As I am reading the book I find myself looking back at the...

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From: Amazon
Posted: Jun-20-2008

Designing stuff is harder than it looks

Norman has created an entertaining and enlightening treatise on the psychology of everyday objects. Why do some things work so well while others completely baffle? What distinguishes successful utility from frustration? How does one research and develop successful products? Most importantly, how...

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From: Amazon
Posted: Jun-04-2008

Great book for everyone who is involved in user-oriented design

Even though some people think this is not useful in practice, I strongly believe this is a must read for anyone who designs an artifact for users. A very amusing and thoughtful book. Can even be used as a required reading in many courses such as UI design.

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From: Amazon
Posted: May-24-2008

Ironic: Great Book - Bad Binding

Without question, a wonderful piece of work! (I've given a dozen copies to students as inspiration.) However, the publisher's stinginess in neither providing adequate interior margins (between pages) nor adequately accommodating for the thickness of the book by type placement on the page is a...

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From: Amazon
Posted: Feb-17-2008

The Years Have Not Been Kind

I take it from other people's reviews that this book is considered by stome to be a classic in the design field. However, I found it unreadable and gave up after a little over a hundred pages. The book failed me on a number of levels, which is particularly surprising considering that the...

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From: Amazon
Posted: Jan-11-2008

Industrial design in a nutshell

Dome-headed engineering professors call it "human factors engineering," "interaction design" or "usability engineering," but the purpose of this strangely-named discipline is far simpler than these appellations suggest: to make everyday items do what users expect them to do. Donald Norman has...

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