The Design of Everyday Things

The promise

Most supermarkets now have a bank of self-checkout stations and, standing beside them all day, an employee whose entire job is explaining them. Scan it first. No, not that one. Put it back on the plate. That employee is the most honest part of the arrangement: living proof that the machines cannot explain themselves. Someone specified them, someone paid for them, someone signed off that they were ready — and the store ended up hiring a human being to translate.

What almost never happens is that the defect gets written down. The customer who set her bag in the wrong place doesn't complain. She apologizes, says she's hopeless with these things, pays, and leaves. As long as the failure lives in her biography instead of the machine's file, nothing gets fixed. That is where the body of ideas Don Norman put into circulation in the late 1980s begins — ideas that now govern how devices, forms, and screens get built. What follows is not his complete framework. We picked five ideas and arranged them along an axis of our own: the age of the relationship between a person and a thing. Because what an object owes you at second zero, across the first few uses, on every single use, and at the ten-thousandth are four different things — and so is the defect that stops you in each stretch. The fifth stretch steps off the clock deliberately: it is the one that explains why the other four never get fixed.

The idea in one image

A wedding reception, the band starts a swing number, and a stranger pulls you onto the floor. You have never danced this in your life. Eight bars in, you know where to go. Nobody explained anything: the hand arrived at your back a fraction of a second before the step, the pressure told you how far, the weight told you when. A good lead doesn't give instructions. A good lead makes the next move feel inevitable.