Book Review: The design of everyday things

1970-01-01

(note: post date is due to the fact it is a pre-migration post with an unknown date)

I’m becoming conscious of the fact that these “reviews” aren’t exactly reviews in the actually critical sense, or actual reviews of the content of the book, but rather closer to just being a recommendation or non-recommendation of the book depending on how I feel with a small reason why, and that’s exactly what this one is too.

I think that pretty much everybody who makes things for other people to use should read this book. It’s readable and enjoyable and provides good guidelines for making things that are actually nice to use. Even if you don’t read it deeply or “study” it, reading it casually (like I did) will give you better knowledge of design and have you start considering the way you interact with things (why can doors be confusing? Why are faucets frustrating? How can I avoid making my things frustrating this way?) and provide guidelines and methods you can follow to make your things good to interact with.

I like how it focuses on design as the practice of creating a good user experience and making things good to use rather than thinking of design in the sense of “make it look nice, if it sucks they can read the manual” thinking of a lot of products. It has parts that are focused on design in a commercial setting but the basic principles - affordances, signifiers, feedback, etc - apply to anything that a human interacts with.

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