The Design of Everyday Things

by Donald A. Norman

It is the distributors who are the real customers, not the people who eventually buy the product in stores and use it in their homes.

In every successful product there lurks the carrier of an insidious disease called “featuritis,” with its main symptom being “creeping featurism.”

Featuritis is an insidious disease, difficult to eradicate, impossible to vaccinate against. It is easy for marketing pressures to insist upon the addition of new features, but there is no call—or for that matter, budget—to get rid of old, unneeded ones. How do you know when you have encountered featuritis? By its major symptom: creeping featurism.

Creeping featurism is the tendency to add to the number of features of a product, often extending the number beyond all reason. There is no way that a product can remain usable and understandable by the time it has all of those special-purpose features that have been added in over time.

Most companies compare features with their competition to determine where they are weak, so they can strengthen those areas. Wrong, argues Moon. A better strategy is to concentrate on areas where they are stronger and to strengthen them even more. Then focus all marketing and advertisements to point out the strong points.

Good design requires stepping back from competitive pressures and ensuring that the entire product be consistent, coherent, and understandable.

The best products come from ignoring these competing voices and instead focusing on the true needs of the people who use the product.

Technology changes the way we do things, but fundamental needs remain unchanged.

Technology is a powerful driver for change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Sometimes to fulfill important needs, and sometimes simply because the technology makes the change possible.

It can take months to go from invention to product, but then decades—sometimes many decades—for the product to get accepted.

There is another problem: the general conservatism of large companies. Most radical ideas fail: large companies are not tolerant of failure. Small companies can jump in with new, exciting ideas because if they fail, well, the cost is relatively low.

Even though the company failed, the employees learned lessons that make their next attempt more likely to succeed.

Ideas take a long time to traverse the distance from conception to successful product.

The world of product design offers many examples of Stigler’s law. Products are thought to be the invention of the company that most successfully capitalized upon the idea, not the company that originated it. In the world of products, original ideas are the easy part. Actually producing the idea as a successful product is what is hard.

With a brand-new concept, it can take decades before the public will endorse it.

Every modern innovation, especially the ones that significantly change lives, takes multiple decades to move from concept to company success. A rule of thumb is twenty years from first demonstrations in research laboratories to commercial product, and then a decade or two from first commercial release to widespread adoption. Except that actually, most innovations fail completely and never reach the public.

the real difference being the timing.

Alphabetical ordering of keys seems logical and sensible: Why did it change? The reason is rooted in the early technology of keyboards. Early typewriters had long levers attached to the keys. The levers moved individual typebars to contact the typing paper, usually from behind (the letters being typed could not be seen from the front of the typewriter). These long type arms would often collide and lock together, requiring the typist to separate them manually. To avoid the jamming, Sholes arranged the keys and the typebars so that letters that were frequently typed in sequence did not come from adjacent typebars.

In fact, we now know that the QWERTY arrangement guarantees a fast typing speed. By placing letters that form frequent pairs relatively far apart, typing is speeded because it tends to make letter pairs be typed with different hands.

The keyboard was designed through an evolutionary process, but the main driving forces were mechanical and marketing. Even though jamming isn’t a possibility with electronic keyboards and computers and the style of typing has changed, we are committed to this keyboard, stuck with it forever. But don’t despair: it really is a good arrangement.

There are two major forms of product innovation: one follows a natural, slow evolutionary process; the other is achieved through radical new development. In general, people tend to think of innovation as being radical, major changes, whereas the most common and powerful form of it is actually small and incremental.

Radical innovation changes lives and industries. Incremental innovation makes things better. We need both.

Most design evolves through incremental innovation by means of continual testing and refinement.

Incremental innovation starts with existing products and makes them better. Radical innovation starts fresh, often driven by new technologies that make possible new capabilities.

What industries are ready for radical innovation? Try education, transportation, medicine, and housing, all of which are overdue for major transformation.

What this means is that although technology is continually introducing new means of doing things, people are resistant to changes in the way they do things.

People are changing; machines are changing. This also means that cultures are changing. There is no question that human culture has been vastly impacted by the advent of technology.

Does the fact that I can no longer remember my own phone number indicate my growing feebleness? No, on the contrary, it unleashes the mind from the petty tyranny of tending to the trivial and allows it to concentrate on the important and the critical. Reliance on technology is a benefit to humanity.

Just as the best chess player is a combination of human and technology, we, in combination with technology, are smarter than ever before.

We are surrounded with objects of desire, not objects of use.

The design of everyday things is in great danger of becoming the design of superfluous, overloaded, unnecessary things.

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.

If the design complicates the engineering requirements so much that they cannot be realized within the cost and scheduling constraints, then the design is flawed. Similarly, if manufacturing cannot produce the product, then the design is flawed.

The product development process is complex and difficult. But to me, that is why it can be so rewarding. Great products pass through a gauntlet of challenges. To satisfy the myriad needs requires skill as well as patience. It requires a combination of high technical skills, great business skills, and a large amount of personal social skills for interacting with the many other groups that are involved, all of whom have their own agendas, all of which believe their requirements to be critical.

And enjoy yourself. Walk around the world examining the details of design. Learn how to observe. Take pride in the little things that help: think kindly of the person who so thoughtfully put them in.

The design principles of this book will not change, for the principles of discoverability, of feedback, and of the power of affordances and signifiers, mapping, and conceptual models will always hold. Even fully autonomous, automatic machines will follow these principles for their interactions. Our technologies may change, but the fundamental principles of interaction are permanent.