- Publisher
- Basic Books
- Published
- 2013
- Shelf
- design: Thinking
- ISBN
- 9780465055715
Thinking
The Design of Everyday Things
Don Norman
Why you push doors that say pull, and what that failure teaches about every object and screen you will ever design.
Why read it
Norman gave us affordances, signifiers and the idea that a confused user is a design fault rather than a stupid person. Forty years on, the teapot on the cover is still the clearest argument ever made that blame belongs to the object. The revised edition brings the thinking up to screens without losing the door handles.
Why own it
It changes how you look at everything outside the book, which is rare. Once you have read it you cannot use a badly labelled tap without diagnosing it, and that habit is the actual education.
Who it is for
Everyone who designs anything a person has to operate, and anyone who has been told users will figure it out.
Opens a search on AbeBooks, a network of independent and antiquarian sellers, which is where a good part of this shelf has to be found, because it is out of print.
Read next
Chosen because they argue with this one, not because a machine noticed they share a category.
