Quotes from The Design of Everyday Things

“Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“Principles of design:
1. Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head.
2. Simplify the structure of tasks.
3. Make things visible: bridge gulfs between Execution and Evaluation.
4. Get the mappings right.
5. Exploit the power of constraints.
6. Design for error.
7. When all else fails, standardize.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“Rule of thumb: if you think something is clever and sophisticated beware-it is probably self-indulgence.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible,”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“Cognition attempts to make sense of the world: emotion assigns value.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“The idea that a person is at fault when something goes wrong is deeply entrenched in society. That’s why we blame others and even ourselves. Unfortunately, the idea that a person is at fault is imbedded in the legal system. When major accidents occur, official courts of inquiry are set up to assess the blame. More and more often the blame is attributed to “human error.” The person involved can be fined, punished, or fired. Maybe training procedures are revised. The law rests comfortably. But in my experience, human error usually is a result of poor design: it should be called system error. Humans err continually; it is an intrinsic part of our nature. System design should take this into account. Pinning the blame on the person may be a comfortable way to proceed, but why was the system ever designed so that a single act by a single person could cause calamity? Worse, blaming the person without fixing the root, underlying cause does not fix the problem: the same error is likely to be repeated by someone else.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“The vicious cycle starts: if you fail at something, you think it is your fault. Therefore you think you can’t do that task. As a result, next time you have to do the task, you believe you can’t, so you don’t even try. The result is that you can’t, just as you thought.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“Finally, people have to actually purchase it. It doesn’t matter how good a product is if, in the end, nobody uses it.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“The design of everyday things is in great danger of becoming the design of superfluous, overloaded, unnecessary things.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“The problem with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“When things go right, people credit their own abilities and intelligence. The onlookers do the reverse. When they see things go well for someone else, they sometimes credit the environment, or luck.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“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.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“The vicious cycle starts: if you fail at something, you think it is your fault. Therefore you think you can’t do that task. As a result, next time you have to do the task, you believe you can’t, so you don’t even try. The result is that you can’t, just as you thought. You’re trapped in a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“Norman’s Law: The day the product team is announced, it is behind schedule and over its budget.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“One way of overcoming the fear of the new is to make it look like the old.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“If designers and researchers do not sometimes fail, it is a sign that they are not trying hard enough—they are not thinking the great creative thoughts that will provide breakthroughs in how we do things. It is possible to avoid failure, to always be safe. But that is also the route to a dull, uninteresting life.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“original ideas are the easy part. Actually producing the idea as a successful product is what is hard.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“In design, one of the most difficult activities is to get the specifications right:”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“In the university, professors make up artificial problems. In the real world, the problems do not come in nice, neat packages. They have to be discovered.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“It is easy to design devices that work well when everything goes as planned. The hard and necessary part of design is to make things work well even when things do not go as planned.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“Because retrieval is a reconstructive process, it can be erroneous. We may reconstruct events the way we would prefer to remember them, rather than the way we experienced them. It is relatively easy to bias people so that they form false memories, “remembering” events in their lives with great clarity, even though they never occurred. This is one reason that eyewitness testimony in courts of law is so problematic: eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. A huge number of psychological experiments show how easy it is to implant false memories into people’s minds so convincingly that people refuse to admit that the memory is of an event that never happened.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“When people fail to follow these bizarre, secret rules, and the machine does the wrong thing, its operators are blamed for not understanding the machine, for not following its rigid specifications. With everyday objects, the result is frustration. With complex devices and commercial and industrial processes, the resulting difficulties can lead to accidents, injuries, and even deaths. It is time to reverse the situation: to cast the blame upon the machines and their design. It is the machine and its design that are at fault. It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“With the passage of time, the psychology of people stays the same, but the tools and objects in the world change.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“Affordances define what actions are possible. Signifiers specify how people discover those possibilities: signifiers are signs, perceptible
signals of what can be done. Signifiers are of far more importance to designers than are affordances.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

“A device is easy to use when the set of possible actions is visible, when the controls and displays exploit natural mappings.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things

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Popular quotes

“U.S. Public Health Service statistics show that eight out of ten drug users are white, but of those in jail for drugs only one in ten is white. Several uprisings in federal prisons labeled “racial riots” by the media have been protests against unjust sentencing policies. Crack addicts are punished a hundred times more severely than cocaine users. Literally one hundred times: according to federal law, a gram of crack is equivalent to one hundred grams of cocaine. Practically everyone imprisoned for crack is black.”
― Eduardo Galeano, quote from Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World

“These ties can’t be broken. Our bonds are secure.”
― L.B. Simmons, quote from The Resurrection of Aubrey Miller

“Sieh sie dir an", sagte Vincent. "Alle finden einfach zueinander. Sie kommen so mühelos zusammen. Warum passiert mir das nicht?”
― quote from Torture the Artist

“listening to Joe and after the game warden had dispatched the suffering animal. “I could see them sending someone out here to shut up The Earl once and for all. They came, shot him, and hung him from the windmill, and they were on a plane back to O’Hare by the time you found him.” “It may be what happened,” Joe said, “but it’s speculation at best. Marcus Hand sent two of his investigators east, and they may come back with something before the trial is over. But they may not. What I have trouble with in that scenario is how this Chicago hit man would know to frame Missy.” Nate said, “They had an insider.” “And who would that be?” “The same guy who told Laurie Talich where she could find me.” “Bud?” “Bingo,” Nate said. “It took a while for me to figure it out and there are still some loose ends I’d like closed, but it makes sense. Missy knew vaguely where I was living because she talks to her daughter, and last year she tried to hire me to put the fear of God into Bud, remember? She might have let it slip to her ex-husband that if he didn’t stop pining over her, she’d drive to Hole in the Wall Canyon and pick me up. Somehow, Bud found out where I was. And by happenstance, he meets a woman in the bar who has come west for the single purpose of avenging her husband. Bud has contacts with the National Guard who just returned from Afghanistan, and he was able to help her get a rocket launcher. Then he drew her a map. He must have been pretty smug about how it all worked out. He thought he was able to take me out of the picture without getting his own hands dirty.” “Bud—what’s happened to him?” Joe asked, not sure he was convinced of Nate’s theory. “Why has he gone so crazy on us?” “A man can only take so”
― C.J. Box, quote from Cold Wind

“You say: “Is it enough for us to just be? But my gut feeling is that I need to do something to be worthy, to contribute, to give…” It is not a gut feeling, it is just what has been conditioned in you by the society. The society has been telling you continuously, persistently, day in, day out, from your very childhood—in the school, in the college, in the university, in the church, the priest, the politician, the parent, the professor—they are all joined together in one single conspiracy to give you the idea that as you are, you are unworthy. You have to do something, you have to prove yourself, then only will you be worthy. This is the strategy of the society to exploit you; this is the society’s ugly way to make slaves of you—not creators but slaves. But in beautiful, sophisticated ways you have been conditioned. Beautiful words cover very ugly realities. The ugly reality is that the society wants to use you as a slave, the society wants to manipulate you, the society wants to control you. It manages it in two ways. On”
― Osho, quote from Living on Your Own Terms: What Is Real Rebellion?

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