Quotes from Donald A. Norman

If you're more susceptible to interruption, you do more out of the box thinking.

The best kind of design isn't necessarily an object, a space, or a structure: it's a process- dynamic and adaptable.

If designers and researchers do not sometimes fail, it is a sign that they are not trying hard enough—they are not thinking the great creative thoughts that will provide breakthroughs in how we do things. It is possible to avoid failure, to always be safe. But that is also the route to a dull, uninteresting life.

In design, one of the most difficult activities is to get the specifications right:

Why do we need to know about the human mind? Because things are designed to be used by people, and without a deep understanding of people, the designs are apt to be faulty, difficult to use, difficult to understand.

Forget the complaints against complexity; instead, complain about confusion.

If the system lets you make the error, it is badly designed.

The meanings of today may not be the meanings of the future.

Could we ever switch to this or any of the many other rational systems? Unlikely: tradition is difficult to overcome.

adults forget how difficult that task was.

Designers know too much about their product to be objective judges: the features they have come to love and prefer may not be understood or preferred by the future customers.

Some things can only be solved by massive cultural changes, which probably means they will never be solved.

It is only at the reflective level that consciousness and the highest levels of feeling, emotions, and cognition reside. It is only here that the full impact of both thought and emotions are experienced. At the lower visceral and behavioral levels, there is only affect, but without interpretation or consciousness. Interpretation, understanding, and reasoning come from the reflective level.

Question everything. I am particularly fond of "stupid" questions. A stupid question asks about things so fundamental that everyone assumes the answer is obvious.

With the passage of time, the psychology of people stays the same, but the tools and objects in the world change.

Design is successful only if the final product is successful—if people buy it, use it, and enjoy it, thus spreading the word. A design that people do not purchase is a failed design, no matter how great the design team might consider it.

Procedural knowledge is difficult or impossible to write down and difficult to teach. It is best taught by demonstration and best learned through practice.

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.

Beauty comes from conscious reflection and experience. It is influenced by knowledge, learning, and culture. Objects that are unattractive on the surface can give pleasure. Discordant music, for example, can be beautiful. Ugly art can be beautiful.

Skeuomorphic is the technical term for incorporating old, familiar ideas into new technologies, even though they no longer play a functional role. Skeuomorphic designs are often comfortable for traditionalists, and indeed the history of technology shows that new technologies and materials often slavishly imitate the old for no apparent reason except that is what people know how to do. Early

Alas, sometimes clever people are too clever for our good. Some well-meaning plumbing designers have decided that consistency should be ignored in favor of their own, private brand of psychology.

Engineers and designers simultaneously know too much and too little. They know too much about the technology and too little about how other people live their live and do their activities.

We are creative and imaginative, not mechanical and precise. Machines require precision and accuracy; people don't. And we are particularly bad at providing precise and accurate inputs. So

Recognize that most of our interactions with products are actually interactions with a complex system: good design requires consideration of the entire system to ensure that the requirements, intentions, and desires at each stage are faithfully understood and respected at all the other stages.