Reddit Reddit reviews The Design of Everyday Things

We found 34 Reddit comments about The Design of Everyday Things. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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The Design of Everyday Things
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34 Reddit comments about The Design of Everyday Things:

u/normanimal · 8 pointsr/IndustrialDesign

This is a classic around designing for usability. Worth taking a look if you haven't already read it.

https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/1452654123

u/Phillsq · 8 pointsr/AskEngineers

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman

It doesn't matter what field you work in, this book will really change the way you look at how you interact with the world.

u/skepticaljesus · 6 pointsr/Watches

it is about exactly what it sounds like, but not in an industrial engineering sense, but in a design and usability sense. Like, this might sound simplistic, but there's an entire chapter on doors.

The author, Don Norman, is a big time design guru.

Whether or not you're a design, if you're interested in why things are the way they are, and how they got that way, it's a great read. https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/1452654123

u/tical0 · 5 pointsr/justneckbeardthings

Don't bother with a 4 year Comp Sci degree or any 4 year degree if you're looking to become a programmer. I've done software engineering for the last 9 years without a degree and without massive debt. Life is much better and you will learn skills that you'll need later.

You need to be able to teach yourself programming skills because of the nature of the job. Teach yourself a few languages which cover various paradigms of languages. Start with more practical ones like Python, then move towards languages that will teach you to solve problems differently like FORTH or Squeak.

Understand what your fellow software people will expect of you. Move towards being a more competent programmer. Build things that are just slightly larger than anything you've built before - but finish your projects before you start a new one and don't let your eyes get bigger than your stomach. If you want to work with smaller businesses, learn a breadth of skills. If you want to work with large companies, find something you have a serious interest in and exploit it until you're a specialist in that domain. Pay heavy attention to design. Software is not a strictly technical field like accounting.

Most importantly, have fun with it. You will gain the ability to create amazing things without worrying about the cost of resources or building materials.

u/Phinocio · 3 pointsr/skyrimmods

In a similar vein, "The Design Of Everyday Things" is a great read. And iirc uses quite a few examples like the one you gave.

u/sukasuka78 · 3 pointsr/starterpacks

They're probably talking about the design of everyday things.
https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/1452654123

u/metasophie · 3 pointsr/userexperience

> Why do people use Sketch more over PS?

Sketch is light weight, easy to use, and largely focused built. PS is a generic image editing tool that isn't.

Don't get caught up in tools though. UXD is a process not a toolset competency.

> Do you guys have any beginner friendly tutorials for a material or flat design interface?

A large chunk of user experience design comes from interaction design which inherits a sizeable chunk from anthropology. So, instead of starting you off on a tutorial which will likely focus you on technology as the process I'd rather start you off with reading.

Plans and Situated Actions - Lucy and other researchers at XEROX Parc defined Interaction Design. This is the birthplace of the idea.

https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Plans_and_Situated_Actions.html?id=AJ_eBJtHxmsC&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y

Lucy Suchman again - Human-Machine Reconfiguration talks about a higher level of thinking when it comes to how people interact with machines.

https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Human_Machine_Reconfigurations.html?id=KES20V7aP4YC&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y

Alan Cooper is one of the early leaders in Interaction Design. In this book he goes over the 101 of user research and how it has been applied in digital technologies.

https://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Design/dp/0470084111

Love him or hate him Donald Norman helped define early Usability and the transition to Interaction design.

https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/1452654123

Don't make me think. Was one of the definitive books highlighting the approach of user centred design.

https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited-Usability/dp/0321965515/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=TN8VJJHK9NKZ1KAA10V5

After you get through all of that I recommend that you spend some time in whatever tool you think works for you and then replicate somebody else's design. Say there's a mobile app (choose a small app) that you use all the time. Replicate every single screen and document with a flow chart how you interact with it to get to every single screen. Break them all up into individual interactions.

Make sure that you design it in the most reusable way possible. If your tool lets you make your own widgets then use them. If your tool allows you to inherit multiple layers, like Axure, then use that too.

Now find some people and test with them. Do some User Testing on the product to find flaws. Do some high level User Research to find out what their core goals are. Iterate. Don't forget that you're an amateur, it's okay to reuse your friend base.

u/KarmaAdjuster · 3 pointsr/gamedesign

I think that's a great article, and definitely something I keep in mind when doing level design. Understandably it gets a bit trickier to do on a large scale for a 2D platformer.

I suppose another good general reference that's applicable to pretty much all design is Donald A. Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things". One of the big take-aways from this book is designing things with affordances that encourage the desired behavior. For example, if you want people to pull a door to open it, give them something to grab, and conversely, if you want people to push the door to open it, don't distract them with a handle to grab and make an obvious cue where they should push the door.

So perhaps for your 2D platformer, I would try to steer players by guiding them through paths by peppering the different paths with things that they would expect to find in the different regions, to clue them into what lies off screen. For example, imagine there's a city section that has lots of taxi cabs, and another that's got a school. You come to a branch where one path takes you to the taxi cab area, and another takes you to the school, place an add for a taxi service on a bench for one path, and the other a school crossing sign. Even having background characters like children walking to school or getting on a school bus, versus people waiting for cabs could help convey this information while at the same time helping to cement your environments as a living breathing worlds.

Subtle things like these can foreshadow the directions players should take without having a giant obnoxious arrow that feels like it's saying "HEY STUPID PLAYER - GO THIS WAY FOR CABS." This foreshadowing can also be emphasized with shifts in the color pallet and art scheme too.

u/talen_lee · 2 pointsr/tabletopgamedesign

As far as designing orienting around people and making systems people respond to, there's a lot of grist in The Design Of Everyday Things

u/catmoon · 2 pointsr/TrueReddit

Don Norman is not just an ex-Apple employee. He is the author of The Design of Everyday Things, which is the most popular and probably most influential work written about user-centered design. Many of the terms that we use to discuss user-centered design originate from that book.

u/Tall_for_a_Jockey · 2 pointsr/Advice

Industrial design. Read this and if you like it, then please consider this as your new major.

u/bleedcmyk · 2 pointsr/graphic_design

This is what many of the cool kids (and your new competition) are doing:

​

u/Bagimus · 2 pointsr/gamedesign

Having a good art or design teacher can help tremendously, but you can get quite a bit out of those classes even if they are bad. It's not graphic design you necessarily want. I was speaking of design itself. You may laugh but, learning interior decorating is pretty important. Color theory from art courses. Eye travel/focal point theory can really help level design. Lighting & exposure theory from photography(used in rendering). Architecture/engineering(gotta build stuff somehow). Geology(so you can make pretty rocks right/better). Animation techniques(omg do this). Biology, cellular structures and how/why things such as leaves grow the way they do. Statistics(Loot tables, enemy spawn rates, hit rates). Graphic Design(UI & any other sign in a game).

I highly suggest reading books on design. The Design of Everyday Things](https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/1452654123) is a freakin manual for making stuff actually functional/look functional.

History can help too. For instance, the horse is basically the reason towns are as far apart as they are. It's the distance a rider on a horse can travel in a day. Its for a personal project by I just used that to decide distances between towns for an RPG setting(table top).

The courses themselves may be a sham, the teacher may suck, heck the book may be garbage too, but they should still help you build a foundation on which you can do more research into the subject. I remember a post about an electrical engineer that went into Dying Light and drunkenly posted about how the power transformers made no sense found the article. Now this is clearly a case of the artists wanting power lines, and just making them "look" like power lines, but with maybe a little research or understanding they could have made it just that much more believable.

You don't necessarily need to do any of this, but you can draw inspiration/knowledge from anywhere.

Sorry for the long post.

Keep at it, and good luck!

u/too_much_to_do · 2 pointsr/AdviceAnimals

That just means whoever designed the door is a moron.

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/1452654123

u/orcfull · 2 pointsr/Design

Design goes even further than the list you suggested! It's awesome.

I studied interaction design, exploring how humanity interacts with technology and services. Which was always a nice mix of visual, physical design and technical skills to produce the things you design.

I'd recommend reading Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge and The Design of everyday things by Don Norman. Both books are staples for the IAD discipline but I think in general, are just fantastic places to start with design as a concept, not just the technical skills.

https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/1452654123

http://www.designinginteractions.com/book

u/Epledryyk · 2 pointsr/IndustrialDesign

> ppl will have hard time telling the back from front and top from bottom.

Which is, ostensibly, a bad thing

u/GreenyBlues · 1 pointr/samharris

True - it's about Design of Everyday Things design. Definitely not another Silicon Valley circlejerk.

u/doc_samson · 1 pointr/gaming

Your brain is essentially a giant complex pattern-matching heuristic guessing machine. It looks at something and decides "yep that probably is a sabre-tooth tiger holy shit" or in this case "that is a boxy looking thing with a hole at the top, let me rummage through my list of known boxy shapes with holes, oh yeah that's probably a __." This is how people can operate on autopilot performing actions without thinking consciously, which is why someone whose washing machine is near the bathroom may experience an odd urge to throw their clothes in the toilet if they are carrying their clothes and see an open toilet first -- "round hole with a lid sticking up, yep that's where the clothes go."

When drunk the neurons still fire but the brain has trouble making a thorough analysis so you are more on autopilot than when not drunk, so more likely to make errors like this. So when you need a toilet anything remotely roundish/boxy looking with some kind of hole on the top looks like a reasonable place to go -- laundry baskets, trash cans, etc.

It's really just a case of mistaken identity.

Source: The Design of Everyday Things by cognitive scientist Donald Norman. Amazing book, will change the way you look at everything.

TL;DR of the book: fuck doorknob designers right to hell.

u/Westrivers · 1 pointr/marketing

The design of everyday things

Its what im reading while i procrastinate on "thinking fast and low"

It delves into the psychology of how we interact with everyday things. While not dedicated to biases there are cases in the book where certain designs have the ability to trigger autopilot responses ie biases.

Its given me a new insight on how humans interact with an interface and how to structure for it

u/LicensedProfessional · 1 pointr/NoStupidQuestions

I still don't think you're fully getting where I'm coming from.

I want the web-dev eqiuvalent of this: https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/1452654123

u/Stubberz · 1 pointr/CrappyDesign

Check out, The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. He does a whole section on refrigerator interfaces being horrible. Rest of the book is great as well.

u/boomdoodle · 1 pointr/AskProgramming

I would strongly recommend working through the interface guidelines for Android and iOS there are lots of good UX principles in there even for web development. For more general design theory read The Design of Everyday Things .

u/Adys · 1 pointr/hearthstone

> it's reassuring to know that you're validating (heh) Blizzard's decisions

Well, I validate the reasoning. I do think deck slots should have been changed sooner, especially if the final decision was just to increase them.

I think they wanted to tie deckslots to the larger overhaul of the new player experience (with basic decks), the deck recipes and the collection manager changes. I feel that is a mistake, seeing how strongly the community felt about deck slots.

There's a lot to learn from this, in terms of more reactivity to QOL changes. This patch in particular was way off their usual schedule. You can see the patch graph here:

https://github.com/HearthSim/hs-data/graphs/commit-activity

The february tick was a reverted patch that didn't go live, so the gap is even larger than it looks at first glance. Tying a bunch of QOL changes to such a late patch isn't a great idea either.

Anyway yeah. They do put a massive amount of thought on this behind the scenes. Derek Sakamoto gave a talk at last year's GDC about UI, it's worth watching if you're interested. /u/bbrode also talked about deck slots in his latest stream (vod on twitch.tv/bbrode).

If you're interested in UX, I recommend the book The Design of Everyday Things (I'll PM you a PDF if you want it but can't afford it). It will open your eyes to how a lot of people don't put any thought into what they present to their users. Has a lot of applications in UI design (or HCI in general) - when you waste your users' time, you lose customers.

Fun thing to do if you're bored: Try buying Final Fantasy XIV and time how long it takes you until you enter your card #. Then do the same thing with World of Warcraft. Took me ~45 minutes for FFXIV, vs. ~5 minutes for WoW. Blizzard doesn't fuck around.

u/H_Chavez · 1 pointr/UI_Design

I can recommend this book!
Read it twice, really good examples.

https://www.amazon.de/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/1452654123

u/JustSomeBadAdvice · 1 pointr/ethereum

The arguments for and against can be summarized with 2 simple points:

  1. In the real (developed) world, the rule of law takes strict priority over brute force. Laws are developed in such a fashion that they follow the intent of the majority so long as they do not clearly violate the rights of the minority or of individuals. There is no question of what a judge or jury in nearly any developed country would rule in this case.
  2. In situations without trust and without a trustworthy authority, a robustly built and well-tested system will not need a justice system to enforce the rule of law. For example, vending machines are designed not to need a cashier and ATM's are designed not to need a security guard.

    The reality is, Ethereum is not a robustly built and well-tested system, and neither is the Dao. Yes yes yes, this wasn't ethereum's bug, blah blah blah. That's irrelevant - Robust & well designed systems prevent failures by proper and clever design.

    This isn't to shame or bash Ethereum. Ethereum is barely 2 years old. The internet took nearly 25 years to develop. It took 22 years to go from Unix to Linux. It took 20 years to go from public key cryptography to a usable SSL encryption system. It took 18 years to go from the development of a mouse to a widely usable graphical OS, and 5 more to reach something non-geeks could use.

    In conclusion, Ethereum age 2 is not a robustly built and well tested system. It does not create a bad precedent to acknowledge this reality and apply the rule of law until Ethereum grows up. When Ethereum has grown up, miners will refuse to accept arbitrary transaction controls, which is why the Blockchain innovation works so well.
u/manablight · 1 pointr/indiegamedevforum

If you want a good resource for design and usability check out this book http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/1452654123

u/reportingfalsenews · 1 pointr/de
u/johnmudd · 1 pointr/Python

I don't mind the phrase if it's true. But this looks as abstract as any other web framework. Only humans willing to get over the learning curve will use it.

My suggestion for anyone who wants to program for humans is to read The Design of Everyday Things.

u/alialkhatib · 1 pointr/DIY

!!! It makes me happy to hear that people who do this stuff are interested.

I mostly deal with software so I don't have a ton of knowledge about hardware design in particular, but for more general design-related stuff, there are a few things that come to mind:

  • The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, who's independently a very big deal in interaction design (you may have seen him in a Vox video about how a lot of doors are designed terribly).
  • Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling was pretty influential on me. This isn't immediately actionable stuff, but it's a great way of thinking about these things (edit: you can definitely find this online for free if you look around ahem)

    You also might find the GOMS model useful for thinking about design and thinking about how to evaluate designs, and "cognitive load". I've seen people use the NASA-TLX survey (Task Load Index, I think) to try to turn something amorphous like workload and effort and whatnot into something quantifiable. An important underlying point here is that sometimes fewer keystrokes, or faster processes, or whatever, are worse if they require more effort or cause more frustration.

    There are also some academic papers and concepts that might be useful:

  • Parallel Prototyping Leads to Better Design Results, More Divergence, and Increased Self-Efficacy is a ~20 page paper that basically shows that making several designs in parallel and getting feedback on the different options actually measurably yields better final products. Showing someone one prototype to evaluate makes it difficult to think critically about. Anything is better than nothing, and they can't tell you the relative strengths or weaknesses of an idea if it's by itself. Another under-riding point here is to get feedback from other people not in the loop. Novices tend to think that they're capable of shifting their mindset and evaluating their own designs, but it's just not true. Lots of feedback is extremely important.
  • I don't remember the name of the paper but there are the concepts of low/medium/high fidelity prototypes. The important thing to know is that if you give someone a high fidelity prototype they'll nitpick all the little details. The takeaway is that you'll get feedback about the concept if you can give people low fidelity prototypes and ask for feedback. This also allows you to iterate quickly and often. This is hugely applicable to hardware/physical design.

    I'll think if anything else comes to mind.
u/AmandaRekonwith · 0 pointsr/botw

But there was a penultimate awesome ending to Shadow of The Colossus...

PS. I solved the elephant. I remarked that it was stupid design.
Perhaps you should take some time and read a classic:
https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/1452654123

My confusion was most certainly NOT my fault, and I resent the implication.

"When you have trouble with things—whether it's figuring out whether to push or pull a door or the arbitrary vagaries of the modern computer and electronics industries—it's not your fault. Don't blame yourself: blame the designer."