Quotes from Donald A. Norman

Am I an Apple bigot? No. I can critique their products and their customer service philosophy. But overall, they do better than any other player.

The problem with emotion was that it was clearly something important, but-at least according to the old philosophy-it was something to overcome.

A big ethical question is what happens after people stop using the device. Does it degrade the environment? Could it have been designed so it would actually be good for the environment?

A good designer will actually design the company.

Isn't one of your first exercises in learning how to communicate to write a description of how to tie your shoelaces? The point being that it's basically impossible to use text to show that

Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.

Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible

Principles of design: 1. Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head. 2. Simplify the structure of tasks. 3. Make things visible: bridge gulfs between Execution and Evaluation. 4. Get the mappings right. 5. Exploit the power of constraints. 6. Design for error. 7. When all else fails, standardize.

Rule of thumb: if you think something is clever and sophisticated beware-it is probably self-indulgence.

Learning should take place when it is needed, when the learner is interested, not according to some arbitrary, fixed schedule

A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem.

Fail often, fail fast

Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.

The problem with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.

We must design for the way people behave, not for how we would wish them to behave.

Any time you see signs or labels added to a device, it is an indication of bad design: a simple lock should not require instructions.

Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.

The vicious cycle starts: if you fail at something, you think it is your fault. Therefore you think you can't do that task. As a result, next time you have to do the task, you believe you can't, so you don't even try. The result is that you can't, just as you thought.

It is easy to design devices that work well when everything goes as planned. The hard and necessary part of design is to make things work well even when things do not go as planned.

Norman's Law: The day the product team is announced, it is behind schedule and over its budget.

One way of overcoming the fear of the new is to make it look like the old.

A story tells of Henry Ford's buying scrapped Ford cars and having his engineers disassemble them to see which parts failed and which were still in good shape. Engineers assumed this was done to find the weak parts and make them stronger. Nope. Ford explained that he wanted to find the parts that were still in good shape. The company could save money if they redesigned these parts to fail at the same time as the others.

What makes something simple or complex? It's not the number of dials or controls or how many features it has: It is whether the person using the device has a good conceptual model of how it operates.

When things go right, people credit their own abilities and intelligence. The onlookers do the reverse. When they see things go well for someone else, they sometimes credit the environment, or luck.