The Design of Everyday Things

by Donald A. Norman

Usually it is only possible where the head of the company, the CEO, is also the founder. Once the company passes control to others, especially those who follow the traditional MBA dictum of putting profit above customer concerns, the story goes downhill. Profits may indeed increase in the short term, but eventually the product quality deteriorates to the point where customers desert. Quality only comes about by continual focus on, and attention to, the people who matter: customers.

Stigler’s law: the names of famous people often get attached to ideas even though they had nothing to do with them.

Products are thought to be the invention of the company that most successfully capitalized upon the idea, not the company that originated 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.

Hence the keyboard sloped and the keys were laid out in a diagonal pattern to provide room for the mechanical linkages. Even though we no longer use mechanical linkages, the keyboard design is unchanged, even for the most modern electronic devices.

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. After a few iterations and experiments, a standard emerged, one that today governs keyboards used throughout the world, although with regional variations. The top row of the American keyboard has the keys Q W E R T Y U I O P, which gives rise to the name of this layout: QWERTY.

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.

Socrates complained about the impact of books, arguing that reliance on written material would diminish not only memory but the very need to think, to debate, to learn through discussion. After all, said Socrates, when a person tells you something, you can question the statement, discuss and debate it, thereby enhancing the material and the understanding. With a book, well, what can you do? You can’t argue back.

In the 1920s, manufacturers deliberately planned ways of making their products become obsolete (although the practice had existed long before then). Products were built with a limited life span. Automobiles were designed to fall apart. 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.

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.