The Design of Everyday Things

by Donald A. Norman

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.

Affordances define what actions are possible. Signifiers specify how people discover those possibilities: signifiers are signs, perceptible signals of what can be done. Signifiers are of far more importance to designers than are affordances.

When people have trouble using technology, especially when they perceive (usually incorrectly) that nobody else is having the same problems, they tend to blame themselves.

This false blame is especially ironic because the culprit here is usually the poor design of the technology,