HackerNews Readings
40,000 HackerNews book recommendations identified using NLP and deep learning

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Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman, Patrick Egan, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

523 HN comments

The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition, 2nd Edition: Your Journey to Mastery

David Thomas, Andrew Hunt, et al.

4.8 on Amazon

396 HN comments

Dune

Frank Herbert, Scott Brick, et al.

4.7 on Amazon

379 HN comments

Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson, Jonathan Davis, et al.

4.3 on Amazon

368 HN comments

The Selfish Gene

Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

349 HN comments

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

Matthew Walker, Steve West, et al.

4.7 on Amazon

326 HN comments

The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition

Don Norman

4.6 on Amazon

305 HN comments

Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand

4.5 on Amazon

290 HN comments

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

4.6 on Amazon

284 HN comments

Cryptonomicon

Neal Stephenson, William Dufris, et al.

4.4 on Amazon

283 HN comments

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Robert M Pirsig

4.5 on Amazon

270 HN comments

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

David Kushner, Wil Wheaton, et al.

4.8 on Amazon

262 HN comments

The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility" (Incerto)

Nassim Nicholas Nicholas Taleb

4.5 on Amazon

250 HN comments

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

Peter Thiel, Blake Masters, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

247 HN comments

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

Eric Ries

4.6 on Amazon

243 HN comments

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Sorted by relevance

arjieonSep 5, 2015

Dan Norman, in The Design of Everyday Things, quotes Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt as saying "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!". Googling now, the quotation seems rather famous on its own.

yaroneonJune 2, 2011

Reminds me of Carelman's Fantastic Inventions:
http://www.google.com/search?q=carelman&hl=en&client...

Made popular to tech geeks by Don Norman's "the design of everyday things"

DeinosonNov 9, 2018

Donald Norman does a good job explaining why in The Design of Everyday Things. I am sure most of you have probably read it, but if you haven't... https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/...

keithnzonDec 12, 2018

"The design of everyday things" would be the book to read about that kind of stuff. It's a classic and very good, I would consider that a possible "minimum"

danilocamposonOct 8, 2010

I'm 11 pages into the Design of Everyday things and loving it so far. Thank you for the recommendation.

majewskyonAug 22, 2016

If you haven't read it yet, check out "The Design of Everyday Things" [1], which covers just this kind of annoyance, and is a great 101 on any kind of interface design (be it physical or on a computer).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

ChrisMarshallNYonDec 23, 2019

Glad to see Don Norman getting some attention. I’ve always liked him. The Design of Everyday Things should, IMO, be required reading for anyone that designs anything.

I think that Tog feels similarly. When OSX came out, he wrote a polemic, slamming the Dock.

azhenleyonDec 12, 2018

Design of Everyday Things is great.

I even had my Software Engineering students read excepts this semester.

hooandeonMar 16, 2008

I recommend "The Design of Everyday Things" (formely "The Psychology of Everyday Things") by Donald Norman. It's kind of dated and it's focused on product design, but it has some very good ideas about making products that are easy to use and understand.

verdvermonDec 26, 2020

Sprint and Inspired are good books.

Don't Make Me Think and The Design of Everyday Things are also good additions to the library

PakG1onMay 3, 2012

This post you made is just begging you to read The Design of Everyday Things. :) I'm going through it right now, amazing book. Highly recommended.

verdvermonAug 18, 2021

Don't Make Me Think is an excellent book.

The Design of Everyday Things is a classic, though not ui focused.

NatsuonFeb 15, 2012

They're just talking about affordance[1], but it's a pretty good example. Anyone interested in this might also like the book The Design of Everyday Things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

atombenderonJune 27, 2019

Indeed, and I don't like that "design" is thrown around as a synonym for aesthetics.

For a good book about what design is: The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman [1].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expand...

mcphageonJuly 14, 2021

The Design of Everyday Things is a great book, but I feel a little bad that his name got attached to things that violate everything he pushed for :-)

smusamashahonNov 1, 2020

"Good design is invisible" Donald A. Norman - The Design of Everyday things

I have been reading this book for a while and the 10 points in this article seem so much on the surface only with no depth. It's probably about marketing more than design principles.

BjoernKWonNov 6, 2017

In terms of classics there are for example "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman and "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug.

Hack Design is an online design course with curated resources that will give you a great overview of the various areas of design: https://hackdesign.org/lessons

plainOldTextonSep 16, 2017

The Design Of Everyday Things, by Don Norman. I believe this book helped me understand better and establish a foundation for what good design is.

carlmronJan 15, 2018

Why don't we just redesign the system with good UX? I want to send a copy of "The Design of Everyday Things" to the Hawaiian government now.

ChrisMarshallNYonMay 28, 2020

That is cool. Thanks for sharing it!

I remember seeing this image in an older version of Don Norman's famous book The Design of Everyday Things:https://pictures.abebooks.com/JVALLES/3324134975.jpg

I think that was a US plant, but it was a cool idea.

d_mcgrawonOct 7, 2010

I'm reading The Design of Everyday Things right now. It is an amazingly good book. The examples are awesome. It really is changing the way I look at everything.

djanowskionDec 1, 2015

I happened to be reading The Design of Everyday Things at the same time as Understanding Air France 447. It was surprising to see how the concepts explained in the book by Don Norman applied perfectly to explain the errors made by the pilots -- even though airplanes are not everyday things.

munificentonApr 23, 2018

It's been years since I've actively worked on my UI education, but the ones I liked were:

* The Design of Everyday Things

* The Inmates are Running the Asylum

* Any of Edward Tufte's books

* Usability Engineering

squarksonMay 5, 2017

Yes I do mean design in general. The book titled "The Design of Everyday Things" is pretty good IMO, but probably would only interest an older child. Maybe some of the work is to just point out that creating things people use requires making decisions and that whole process is "design."

bob1029onJune 9, 2021

I feel like every front-end engineer should be required to read The Design of Everyday Things and pass a quiz before being handed a job.

Building shitty UI because it looks cool in your marketing materials is doing a criminal disservice to your users and ultimately your business.

gs7onDec 23, 2018

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. Fantastic book that makes you realize how poorly designed many things in our lives are.

rwmjonMay 11, 2019

Don Norman's book "The Design of Everyday Things" is a classic and very relevant today: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Everyday-Things-MIT-Press/dp...

shmulkey18onAug 9, 2019

> Design for Everyday Things

Do you mean "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman? If so, I agree that it is a great book.

austenallredonJuly 15, 2015

I would highly recommend reading, "Don't make me think" and "The design of everyday things."

I've also heard good things about "Design for Hackers," but I could never get into it

azhenleyonSep 30, 2019

If you enjoyed reading this then I would definitely recommend The Design of Everyday Things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things).

zafkaonApr 29, 2013

This article ties in with a book I just started reading(culled from Fog Creek's Reading list) called "The design of Everyday Things"
It inspires me to resist "cool" at the expense of what works best.

drivers99onSep 18, 2013

It was. He also had some other more elaborate examples, but I couldn't think of any. I believe he is coming out with a new edition of The Design of Everyday Things which is mostly rewritten. Looks like it's coming out November 5th.

iceyonAug 18, 2009

"The Design of Everyday Things" would probably be a good start: http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...

otrasonApr 4, 2018

I highly recommend the book "The Design of Everyday Things."

It makes me constantly think about the decisions that went into designing things around me, what works, and what doesn't. Very helpful when making design and UX decisions of my own.

thrilleratplayonSep 2, 2016

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

This should be a required reading for anyone who does UI design. It helps explain why items you interact with subconsciously frustrate you and why product simplicity is typically better than more features.

B1FF_PSUVMonFeb 23, 2018

> Interesting interface design problem.

And so Don Norman (of The Design of Everyday Things book fame) is at it from UCSD: http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~norman/

segneronJuly 12, 2014

Surprisingly, the book that had the largest impact on how I think about (software) products is "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman. You won't find expressions like 'creating value' nor the word 'software' in it but IMHO its ideas are at the beating heart of any product-market fit.

FuturebotonFeb 17, 2016

"The Design of Everyday Things" is still a great place to start if you're looking for a broad, general overview of UI and UX.

mcdanonMar 12, 2019

This is right. No none has yet written “The Design of Everyday Things” for voice interaction. We just don’t know what works yet so we are redoing what was done before.

rando832onApr 24, 2020

"The Design of Everyday Things", I would consider the digital versions to be

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace

http://codev2.cc/

and

Free Software Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman

https://shop.fsf.org/books-docs/free-software-free-society-s...

andrewtbhamonOct 19, 2010

From another recent thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1768358

Favorite UX books

The Design of Everyday Things

The Humane Interface

Contextual Design

war1025onOct 5, 2020

The article leads with a quote by Don Norman.

I read his book "The design of everyday things" after hearing a lot of people speak highly of it.

I found it quite underwhelming.

Anyone have insight of what people think is so noteworthy about that book?

mcantoronJan 14, 2011

Design is the successive application of constraints until only a unique product is left.

- Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

amohronMar 12, 2008

The Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman

I know he's gotten some flak lately for ripping on 37signals, but this book seriously changed how I look at the world... especially doors.

Freakonomics - Steven Levitt

Good for understanding the value of taking another perspective.

timcedermanonJuly 9, 2010

Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things?

Should be required reading for anyone interested in HCI. Quite eye-opening to things such as user centred design, affordances, design constraints, etc. Easy to read and thought-provoking.

josteinkonNov 26, 2016

I've read a few of these books and can definitely recommend the following:

- Working effectively with legacy code

- The design of everyday things

- Don't make me think

In the mean time, it seems it's time to put in a new amazon order :)

vazambonMay 9, 2018

I honestly felt the same way about "The design of everyday things". The first few chapters are quite interesting but it gets insanely repetitive after a while. To be fair I feel that way about a lot of pop-sci books...

gavinpconAug 30, 2016

Have you read any Don Norman? Like Emotional Design or The Design of Everyday Things? Based on the principles (and even the examples) given here, I'm wondering how this book adds to that work.

mortenjorckonJan 21, 2010

I wonder if Adams has ever read Donald A. Norman's classic The Design of Everyday Things. He'd probably love it; this kind of critique is exactly what the book explores so well.

shmerlonJan 15, 2013

Yeah, gray font on the white background is not pleasant. For a page which talks about books like "The Design of Everyday Things" it's kind of a fail ;)

borskionFeb 5, 2019

The Design of Everyday Things” changed the way I see literally everything. You’ll never look at doors the same way again, and prepare to forever be frustrated by poorly designed objects, and delighted by incredibly well designed ones.

There is no better book on the philosophy of UX, imho.

runevaultonSep 5, 2008

Since Don't Make Me Think already came up, going to add
About Face (have 2.0 but heard 3.0 is even better)
http://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Desi...

and Design of Everyday Things
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...

comatose_kidonJuly 10, 2008

On this list, I've read the following:

Hackers & Painters

The Design of Everyday Things

The Soul of a New Machine

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who...

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

All were great books, so I should probably add the others to my 'read this' list.

LoSboccacconFeb 8, 2017

too much hard coding books imho. 'the design of everyday thing' and 'don't make me think' should be read more.

dcpdxonJune 21, 2011

I'm currently reading The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. Even if you won't be doing much work on the design side, it's a great study in why things are made the way they are and what constitutes good/bad design.

dmixonAug 19, 2008

Why haven't I found this site before? He's written some great essays.

Has anyone read The Design of Everyday Things?? Worth reading?

cdrinionOct 20, 2019

Absolutely wonderful description. (This comment was more interesting than the blog post). I've been trying to figure out how to justify to PMs/etc that we should spend time to make delightful software, and "emotional design" seems like just the thing. I really enjoyed The Design of Everyday Things; I'll have to give Emotional Design a read!

paloaltokidonDec 26, 2017

I recommend "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. Norman. It's not necessarily about developing mental models, but more about the fallout of how people can mistakenly use systems if you don't make the mental model of your design intuitive.

shangxiaoonAug 15, 2014

I feel I should mention 'The Bible' of usability: The Design of Everyday Things [1], which is highly recommended.

[1] http://amzn.com/0465050654

plainOldTextonMar 6, 2017

+1 The Design of Everyday Things. I believe this is a must read for anyone creating something for other people. I'm definitely a better designer because of it.

theVirginianonMar 18, 2015

If you have not read Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things I highly recommend it.

permaradonOct 18, 2020

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman. He covers pilot error a lot in this book in how it falls back on design and usability. Very interesting read.

cinntaileonMar 28, 2021

The book "the design of everyday things" by Don Norman deals with this for design. I think he even coined the term?

natchyonFeb 18, 2021

That concept is from the book “the design of everyday things” by Dan Norman. A Seminal book in UX psychology.

greenligonMay 12, 2019

I believe it was written by Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, one of the more influential books on design. Definitely worth a read, irrespective of the contents of this article.

gr33nmanonJune 13, 2016

Those interested in the philosophy of door handles will enjoy Don Norman's classic:

The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465050654/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_OkRx...

sukilotonJune 30, 2020

Please, just read Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things instead of a hundred dashed out blog posts.

kriroonJan 16, 2017

On the plus side this is actually an example in the usability classic "The Design of Everyday Things". Iirc Norman concludes that he doesn't have a clue as to why they were designed that way and offers some hypotheses which he dismisses right away (book is at home so I can't check) :D

shooonSep 23, 2018

As featured on the cover of Don Norman's book "the design of everyday things", which I'd recommend to anyone involved in designing or building things to be used by people

rjrodgeronMar 4, 2011

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman

The internal design philosophy of any creative person completely permeates their work.

Many developers have very little awareness of this. The primary symptom: randomly indented code.

enjeywonAug 2, 2020

I've got serious doubts about a list of 'UX laws' that doesn't include any references to affordances (or anything else from 'The Design of Everyday Things').

Also, this site is impossible to read?

bob1029onAug 5, 2020

Every single engineer and executive working at Tesla right now needs to grab a copy of The Design of Everyday Things and read it cover to cover before returning to work.

rgloveronJuly 21, 2011

I thought the name looked familiar. I downloaded a copy of "The Design of Everyday Things" not too long ago. Guess I'll have to crack it open?

For those that are also interested: http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...

beyondcomputeonJuly 24, 2021

The Design of Everyday Things – Donald Norman

beyondcomputeonJune 25, 2020

Great-great analysis! We need more of those exposing apparent lack of understanding of basic principles of usability by designers of many modern products. My instinct is to tell them, “Read The Design of Everyday Things at least, please!”

daliusdonJune 20, 2018

In that case we should send copy of "The Design Of Everyday Things" to designer of the system.

tunedonApr 29, 2016

About "The Design of Everyday Things", there is also a course on Udacity based on the book: https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-the-design-of-everyd...

will_pseudonymonNov 27, 2015

Really looking forward to this book! I'm constantly blown away by bad UI, and I'm wondering to see what I can learn, and what I might be able to teach others.

Anyone have ideas for additional learning/connecting with others in this area? I am about to start reading "The Design of Everyday Things".

reledionAug 30, 2013

After taking an HCI course and reading The Design of Everyday Things, I also notice poorly designed things quite often.

BTW, there's a free course based off that book starting this fall: https://www.udacity.com/course/design101.

ronyfadelonFeb 23, 2020

Seeing objects like this makes me think of the book, the Design of Everyday Things[1].

We often forget that these products have been designed by someone, somewhere, who thought long and hard about their aesthetics, usability and cost.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

rangerpoliticonApr 19, 2019

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman.

lcuffonFeb 5, 2019

Modern Physics and Anti-physics by Adolph Baker. Understanding what science is as process and theory helped me distinguish science and pseudo-science in a major way.

Also: A Pattern Language, The Design of Everyday Things, and An Introduction to General System Thinking, the latter by Gerald Weinberg

jseligeronFeb 21, 2018

Reading this reminds me of The Design of Everyday Things.

avichalponMay 20, 2019

Many consider Don Norman, the author of The Design of Everyday Things, father of modern UX design. If you want to absorb the basic principles of usability, you should read it.

tcarnellonApr 12, 2011

Regarding design, I would add Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday things - entertaining and you wont look at the world the same way again!

WofielonSep 5, 2017

Perhaps 'The Design of Everyday Things' by Donald Norman?

cel1neonAug 12, 2016

Must-read in this category: "The design of everyday things" by Don Norman.

ab_ioonDec 12, 2018

Reading "The Design of Everyday Things" will give you a sense of the basics -- After that try learning a popular frontend-web framework (like Bootstrap / Foundation) which follows lot of the industry-standard UI practices out-of-the-box. Also checkout things like WAI-ARIA / WCAG, which outline accessibility standards on the web.

dmreedyonAug 10, 2016

I'm going to take the pretentious and predictable* route here and recommend The Design of Everyday Things. It's not about REST APIs or whatever particular instance you're after, but it is more philosophical about what APIs are.

*Like a freshman preaching Rand

brownbatonOct 30, 2018

With nod to Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things,” including the chapter “Human Error? No, Bad Design.”

For reference, an article he also wrote with that title, discussing design and human error in major transportation accidents:

https://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/human_error_no_bad.html

trikonasanaonFeb 24, 2019

Check out The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman too. He talks very highly of the NTSB and their accident investigation reports. The root cause isn’t usually one single error, but a series of mistakes that collectively caused the accident.

justinucdonApr 18, 2017

Don Norman - The Design of Everyday Things

icebrainingonSep 20, 2017

Donald Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, has an article about that (not touchscreens, but mouse-like device that sounds even worse): http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/interaction_design_f.html

tcbascheonDec 16, 2019

Some highlights of the year:

Children of Time - (Tchaikovsky)

Steve Jobs (Isaacson) - as an aside, I've started reading his daughters (Lisa) book Small Fry

The Colour out of Space - (Lovecraft)

iWoz (Wozniak)

The Design of Everyday Things (Norman)

huxleyonJan 16, 2017

A little off topic, but anyone interested in picking up "The Design of Everyday Things" be aware it was previously published as "The Psychology of Everyday Things". There was an expanded and updated edition in 2013 so you should probably look for that one.

edoceoonDec 7, 2020

This book: The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman really helped me with UX/UI thinking

Shivam_DewanonApr 4, 2018

-Design of everyday things

-Sapiens : A brief history of humankind

-Zen pencils

- Book of Life - By J. Krishnamurti

13of40onAug 9, 2016

That's a very good point - I've always felt it was a shame that in order for a thesis to be "publishable" you have to frame it in 300 to 500 pages. The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman is a great example. It's an awesome book, and anyone who's designing user-facing-anything should read it, but I think the story could have been told in about half as many words.

asnyderonDec 23, 2010

Every time I read something like this I think about Donald Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things", although it was first published in the 80s, we have yet to fully learn its lessons.

imwilsonxuonOct 8, 2010

The Design of Everyday Things is cool, indeed. Norman's a great author who keeps questioning what we take for granted.

However, if you are looking for something more pragmatic, Steve's Don't Make me Think and JJG's The Elements of User Experience should be the top of your reading list, especially on web design.

navshaikhonSep 1, 2009

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
http://www.amazon.com/Dreaming-Code-Programmers-Transcendent...

The Design of Everyday Things
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...

pkambonApr 1, 2011

Read this book: "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...

mcantoronNov 24, 2009

Donald Norman frowns, sir!

Edit: Do people just not know who Donald Norman is? Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Norman#Partial_bibliogra...

He wrote "The Design of Everyday Thing".

atom-morganonApr 9, 2015

I'm currently reading The Design of Everyday Things. I'm not sure if anyone else does this but I recently created a Github repo to log all of the books I read [1]. I could use Goodreads but I like the visibility of Github for any future employers.

[1] https://github.com/atom-morgan/read-it

tr0ssonMar 20, 2013

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman

emansimonJune 11, 2013

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman

bo1024onNov 9, 2018

I want to mention the classic book "The Design of Everyday Things" which shares a lot of points with this post, though not about software at all.

gvajraveluonAug 14, 2017

The two resources I recommend are The Designer of Everyday Things (https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/...) and Designing Interactions (https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Interactions-Press-Bill-Mog...)

Both focus on more than website design, but they helped me understand how users interact with my user interfaces. I'm sure there are also a ton of great blog posts out there too, but I found these books the most helpful.

pkambonMay 30, 2012

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

WickyNilliamsonMar 2, 2015

Can recommend these two books: The Design of Everyday Things and The Non-Designer's Design Book.

TDoET will teach you about usability and designing for that. TNDDB will give you a vocabulary for design (much like design patterns give a common vocabulary for code problems, this does for design IMO).

rwmjonJuly 20, 2021

Firefox 90 has terrible usability with the new "Photon" interface. Has no one read The Design of Everyday Things? I just don't understand what they're trying to do - they need to keep and increase their userbase, not push away the few users they have left.

mosburgeronMar 12, 2008

-Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary

-The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman

-UNIX in a Nutshell (O'Reilly book written by Arnold Robbins)

goblin89onAug 19, 2019

To internalize something is to make it come naturally without reminding yourself about it every time. Practice, reading material on those topics (books like “The Design of Everyday Things”, “Notes on Graphic Design and Visual Communication”) help.

ritchieaonOct 14, 2016

My favorites are the classic "The Design of Everyday Things" and "Microinteractions" (http://microinteractions.com/about-the-book/).

francisssononFeb 5, 2010

This post is reminiscent of The Design of Everyday things. A book that receives much praise but really annoyed me. Not so much the message, but the way it was written.

otalponMar 6, 2017

+1 for The Design Of Everyday Things. Unlike perhaps other books in this thread, it literally changes the way you look at the world, or at least the objects around you.

majewskyonNov 1, 2017

I second the recommendation of "The Design of Everyday Things". I read it in college and it influenced my perspective on nearly everything I build. Not just UIs, although that's what the book is about at first sight.

carlmronOct 16, 2019

This is why I recommend all software engineers to read The Design of Everyday things. These basic design principles are helpful in designing UIs, APIs and architecture.

tboerstadonSep 10, 2014

This same example, along with many others, are covered in Don Norman's classic "The Design of Everyday Things".

johnobrien1010onFeb 22, 2018

I'm not sure of any good courses. Getting an MBA is often helpful for getting into PM.

Here is a list of books I'd recommend:

Tuned In
Joel on Software
Don't Make Me Think
The Lean Startup
The Mythical Man Month
The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO
The Design of Everyday Things
Escape Velocity
Competition Demystified
The Art of Agile Development

tommaxwellonJan 15, 2013

"The Design of Everyday Things" has been sitting on my desk for months. I really need to get around to reading it.

memonkeyonOct 30, 2016

I really want to go back and mention "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman because the book lives and breathes what any designer and developer should strive for when designing (and developing) a web, mobile, or desktop app. Seriously, go read it.

majewskyonSep 2, 2017

"The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman describes mental models that I apply all the time when designing products or processes.

VvdHoutonMay 19, 2019

Just read about "The Laws of Simplicity" and "The design of everyday things".

They seem to be frequently recommended. Anybody any experience with these?

Big thanks in advance!

mixedbitonSep 22, 2015

Don Norman, the author of "The Design of Everyday Things", writes that in most cases when the fault is attributed to human operator, it is actually a design error.

YZFonOct 14, 2016

"The Design of Everyday Things" is a classic.

verdvermonJune 24, 2020

I started rereading The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman last night.

They be building Norman Layouts at GitHub

hellbanneronApr 19, 2015

"When there is error, we blame humans. But it is not humans who are stupid, it's the machines. We should design machines to minimize error. Humans are bad at precision so why demand it?" -- Don Norman, Design of Everyday Things

stevenwooonJuly 8, 2018

This feels like a subset of The Design of Everyday Things with some specific additions for corporate logos, it's unclear to me if the author has read the book or is unfamiliar with it and unintentionally references the first chapter in the conclusion.

umangjaipuriaonSep 5, 2008

The Design Of Everyday Things (mentioned above as well) is one of my favourite design books.

But will reading books help? What is your intent in suggesting such books to them?

sbukonOct 1, 2018

For you budding industrial designers;

The Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman

Ways of Seeing - Jon Berger

Principles of Form and Design - Wucius Wong

Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work - Nigel Cross

rahimnathwanionDec 31, 2015

Overview of being a PM:

- Inspired

- The Product Manager's Desk Reference

- The Lean Startup

- Agile Product Management with Scrum

Targeted at interview preparation, but good for breadth:

- Decode & Conquer

- Cracking the PM interview

Other good books for PMs:

- Talking to Humans

- Hooked

- The Design of Everyday Things

- Zero to One

- Traction

rrampageonApr 22, 2020

Sure.

1. Introduction to the Theory of Computation - Sipser and Introduction to Algorithms - CLRS (for the Algorithms course)

2. Machine Learning - Tom Mitchell

3. Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach - Russell and Norvig

4. Design of Everyday Things - Norman (for HCI)

5. Operating Systems in Three Easy Pieces [0]

Most of the courses had their own notes, slides and suggested research papers as primary reading and the textbooks were mostly used as a secondary reference.

[0] - http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/

enhdlessonApr 23, 2021

Are you trying to learn to use Figma specifically? I think you can just pick it up and start using it pretty easily. Good design principles are ultimately tool-agnostic though.

- The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman is the classic for learning design.

- Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug is another classic, and very digestible.

- Refactoring UI is a good book for those coming from a developer perspective: https://refactoringui.com/book/

- Mismatch by Kat Holmes talks about the importance of inclusive design for both usability and innovation.

- Not a book, but Apple's Human Interface Guidelines are excellent: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

- Similarly, just try reading the design principles of companies with good design, like Shopify: https://polaris.shopify.com/experiences/crafting-admin

- If you're interested in building a design system, I would start with InVision's Design Systems Handbook: https://www.designbetter.co/design-systems-handbook

Ultimately, good design is informed by research - what is the problem you're trying to solve? What is the user's goal and how can you make that easy for them to achieve? What are you trying to communicate? Start with interviewing 5+ potential users, distilling that data into actionable opportunities, and sketching wireframes on paper before jumping into Figma.

skfistonMay 16, 2018

My favorites so far:

- Pragmatic Thinking & Learning by Andy Hunt

- The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

-

The Effective Engineer* by Edmond Lau

- The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas

- SQL Performance Explained by Markus Winand

And http://teachyourselfcs.com curriculum is pretty good as well.

As a side note, there's so much we can learn from game programmers and OS/database/compiler engineers.

codetrotteronJan 20, 2019

There’s a book that talks about these things called The Design of Everyday Things. I’ve only read parts of it myself but a friend of mine read the whole book and said it was good. From the parts I’ve read I agree. The author has some given some talks and presentations relating to UX as well that can be found on YouTube.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/840.The_Design_of_Everyd...

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Don+Norman

spartangoonOct 24, 2012

No one says you can't study it even now (except perhaps your calendar)... One classic starting point is "The Design of Everyday Things"[1].

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...

raganwaldonJuly 9, 2010

Yes, and I give it a full five stars. The Design of Everyday Things (originally "The Psychology of Everyday Things") is incredibly accessible and strikes a very good balance between selling you on the importance of good design, explaining the concepts behind it, and entertaining you with examples both good and ludicrously bad.

foofoo55onJan 2, 2016

I highly recommend The Design of Everyday Things to everyone I know who is designing any kind of user interface, whether machinery, houses, or software.

I believe that until there is some effective, easy, and universally-accepted metric of UI quality, there will be little to differentiate good designers from poor. ("Our UI meets UIQC Class 1 Standards", or in a specification, "All user screens must score level 96 or better on the UIQC test", or some such thing.)

athomonJuly 8, 2010

The folks coming down on Derek might do well to read Donald Norman's book, The Design of Everyday Things, which speaks directly to this issue. It's important to remember that the purpose of design is not simply to dazzle the beholder, or make people think, but to make useful things usable. It's easy for designers to forget this, especially the avant-garde sort who fall in love with their own creative spirit, tend to win the accolades for their "radical" ideas. In fact, Norman's book introduced me to one of my favorite design epithets:

"It probably won an award."

gattilorenzonSep 26, 2017

> Sometimes catering to how the machine works makes things better than going through hoops for marginal returns and complicating every part of the stack with that technical debt.

You might be interested in reading "the design of everyday things" by Norman.

If you are developing something for your own use, who cares. But for something that users (even technical users) are going to use, these marginal returns are what makes the difference between a pleasant or a frustrating experience. It's the kind of things that Apple users (used to?) expect in Macs.

ChrisMarshallNYonMay 1, 2021

Learn. That's what I did.

The issue is that many designers and engineers loathe Usability and Accessibility people (like Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman).

For me, it all started with Don Norman's excellent book The Design of Everyday Things[0] (nee The Psychology of Everyday Things).

Reading that book changed the way that I view the world. I can't walk through a door, anymore, without evaluating its affordances and usability.

The challenge (for me) is melding usability and aesthetics. In my experience, designing and implementing a truly usable software interface is hard. It's also highly iterative. A lot of "running things up the flagpole" stuff. I throw out a lot of code, and slaughter a lot of sacred cows.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

tobinharrisonDec 8, 2018

Sounds like you're on the right path in that you have a genuine desire to create great looking products. This means you have a respect for design, which is hugely important.

I used to be a back-end guy (I once co-authored a book on an ORM and just love middle tier and db shizzle). I had a huge appreciation for products that looked and felt great, but only had the back-end skills. I had a genuine desire to build skills in design so I could make better products.

If you want to take some short-cuts to build great looking stuff I'd do the following

- Build a mood board of stuff you think looks great. Set your own standards bar.

- Play around with Sketch or similar to learn how to get the look you like (this will make you think about UI design problems). This might take years but you have to start somewhere.

- Read "Design of Everyday Things" and "Don't Make Me Think" and a few other design classics. The principles stand strong.

- Get help from designers to bridge the gap between your skill level and where you want to be. When I started my company, I'd find designers who had a visual style I liked and paid them to help out.

overeateronOct 14, 2016

Some of the reading list in the UI/UX course at Brown:

http://cs.brown.edu/courses/csci1300/

Particularly (free links with pdfs),

Don Norman - Design of Everyday Things
https://archive.org/details/DesignOfEverydayThings

Bill Buxton - Input Manuscript
http://www.billbuxton.com/inputManuscript.html

Alan Cooper - About Face
http://feiramoderna.net/download/pos-positivo/COOPER-Alan/Ab...

Vignelli - The Vignelli Canon
http://www.vignelli.com/canon.pdf

Bill Buxton - Sketching User Experiences
http://bscw.wineme.fb5.uni-siegen.de/pub/bscw.cgi/d807887/Sk...

(the workshop slides)
https://www.medien.ifi.lmu.de/lehre/ss14/id/Day%202%20Sketch...

eswatonOct 16, 2010

If anyone wants a copy of The Design of Everyday Things, it’s yours. Covering shipping from Canada would be much appreciated.

riwskyonSep 5, 2020

Don Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Thing...). Yes, API design has its own gotchas and specific practices—but some of the best (and worst) APIs I’ve ever interacted with were good (or bad) for the same reasons any kind of design can be good ( or bad): affordances, feedback, coherent conceptual models, and so on.

hsmyersonJuly 7, 2013

The Design of Everyday Things: Donald A. Norman

The Elements of Typographic Style, by Robert Bringhurst

Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte,
Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte

Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative by Edward R. Tufte

Beautiful Evidence by Edward R. Tufte

Small Is Beautiful by E. F. Schumache

The Art of Color by Johannes Itten

Were I to teach a course, that would be the list of text books required (so you would own them after). First and only assignment---read them. Final and only exam---what did you learn and understand. Supply proof.

ChrisMarshallNYonDec 31, 2020

I liked the one he wrote ;). Last year (BC), I enjoyed Advanced Swift. In fact, I was inspired to write a collection utility, based on it.

He knows his stuff; especially when teamed with the wizards at objc.io.

But the classics are never out of date. Rapid Development, along with other McConnell classics, is a "must-read," as far as I'm concerned.

But the book that probably has had more impact on me, than any other, was The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman. It -literally- changed the way I look at the world (as a designer). I think anyone that designs things to be used by other people, would benefit from reading it.

HawramanionJune 10, 2011

"The same technology that simplifies life by providing more functions in each device also complicates life by making the device harder to learn, harder to use. This is the paradox of technology." -Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things.

gurkendoktoronJan 15, 2013

I wish even the "deep" hackers would read these books and realise that command line interfaces and C prototypes are human interfaces too. Yet every time something explodes because someone confused -r and -R on the shell or something equally ridiculous, the internet echo is largely "LOL if you cannot read manpages, then why are you even using computers".

I liked the nuclear reactor example in The Design of Everyday Things because it illustrated (again) that usability is important even if only trained professionals have to use <something>.

dmixonNov 18, 2014

Right, many software devs have read The Design of Everyday Things [0] and understand the value of usability. But they didn't read Don Norman's follow up book Emotional Design [1] which explains that usability is only 50% of the answer - emotion is the other 50%. And emotion often means pretty, or at the minimum a positive UX.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expande...

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Design-Love-Everyday-Things/...

kebmanonOct 3, 2020

I don't have a TV, only a few monitors (it's very liberating, actually). So instead I'll talk about my microwave. Yes, unironically! :D It has two dials. OMG how do I survive with only two dials? How do I program it? Well, the answer is, unsurprisingly, that I don't program it. Instead I crank it to watever wattage I need (usually the top one), and the time I think it'll take until the food I becomes hot. Aaaand that's it. No programming. No fiddling or mindlessly pushing buttons in the hopes of finding the right one. Only two dials. One for wattage (power output), and the other for time. I think it's really great. There's even some indicators on the Watt-dial for thawing and stuff like that, but I seldom need it, so I usually just keep it rested on 800W. It's the required wattage for most TV dinners anyway. And hot pockets. Don't forget hot pockets guys. How would I survive without...... If you didn't get it, this is actually a post about UIs, and how much I love the book The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman.[1]

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expand...

evincarofautumnonJan 13, 2016

I tutored CS in college and I’ve seen this effect as well.

On assignments where literally every step was documented, my students would still often not know what to do, because they had missed something small but crucial.

After reading “The Design of Everyday Things”, I’ve come to design things based on the assumption that people don’t read. Even when their sole task is to read, they just don’t.

I write compilers, and producing good error messages is a crucial part. But as it turns out, the best predictor of a programmer’s ability to notice and correct an error is not good error-message text—it’s accurate and precise source locations.

smt88onOct 21, 2015

First, read The Design of Everyday Things. After that, I don't know.

I will say, though, that you won't ever come up with a good UI unless you watch people use it as early as possible. There is absolutely no substitute for sitting behind someone (preferably a lay person) and watching them try to accomplish whatever task they want with your UI.

jonahonFeb 18, 2012

Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things [1] and Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles [2] are must-read classics about human interfaces in both physical and "computer" realms.

[1] http://www.jnd.org/books.html#33
[2] http://www.jnd.org/books.html#34

rdwallisonJan 14, 2013

I don't know about courses but I read The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman more than 10 years ago and it profoundly changed my life.

Obviously it doesn't only deal with UI design but I really recommend it if you're looking for a place to jump off from.

Be warned, once you read it you'll find yourself becoming extraordinarily annoyed by certain types of doors.

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

coldteaonSep 26, 2017

>You might be interested in reading "the design of everyday things" by Norman.

I've read it 20+ years ago as suggested by a HCI class at the uni.

The point still stands, regardless of whether it's something for "one's own use" or not. The technical debt from such decisions like a non-case-sensitive fs and the piles upon piles of kludges required to sustain it affect everybody, including the "non technical users".

>these marginal returns are what makes the difference between a pleasant or a frustrating experience

Users can be taught a simple, unambiguous rule, and they'll never think twice about it. "Pleasant experiences" that come with performance penalties, bugs and caveats on the other hand, make them suffer more, whether they know the cause or not. At some point the Clippy was somebody's idea to "delight the users" too.

>It's the kind of things that Apple users (used to?) expect in Macs.

And the kind of thing Apple itself decided it was not worth it.

numlockedonDec 23, 2012

This is a well-trod point, but one that's always good to be reminded of. A similar argument is made in The Design of Everyday Things - if your interface needs an instruction manual, even if it's only one word (for instance the word "pull" on a door) then the interface is not doing its job.

I'd highly recommend DOET for anyone interested in this sort of thing.

shinkaromonDec 24, 2019

If you read The Design of Everyday Things, you'd gladly remember that to each user-unfriendly design, the author sarcastically added "but it won a lot of design awards". Which implied that the givers of those awards had one-track mind. And since the book's author co-wrote the article that we discuss, aesthetics at the cost of usability is a major sin for him.

On the other hand, since (insert obligatory joke about $1000 monitor stands), losing customers is no longer their worry.

specialistonFeb 27, 2016

Good article. Interfaces and modularity are core concepts, worthy of much attention. Especially questions like how to do functional decomposition, finding the right abstractions, and good interface design.

I'll chew on your statements about the success of Python. Though my first love was LISP, I'm now far more comfortable leaning on static typing and composition.

---

The best book on software design I've ever read was written by two economists.

Design Rules: The Power of Modularity

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Rules-Vol-Power-Modularity/dp/0...

This book didn't change how I program so much as changed how I think. Like the difference between making and criticizing art. Whereas SICP gave me new mental models, Design Rules gave me new philosophies. More like Design of Everyday Things did.

psykoticonJuly 1, 2012

Most skillful people will tend to develop good taste and a sense of design in and around their own field of expertise. The Design of Everyday Things has helped people I know expand that sense beyond its original narrower confines to, as the title suggests, the world of everyday things.

The downside is that now some of them think they can instantly render a well-founded opinion on anything relating to design. Although that may simply be a corollary of the general phenomenon where experts in one field (and programmers and engineers may be the worst) think they possess the master key to critical thinking and problem solving in any and all fields.

asafiraonAug 30, 2013

This might not be the best place to mention this, but here goes anyway: I started reading The Design of Everyday Things, but I've been disappointed so far. To be fair, I'm only 50 pages in, but I haven't read anything mind blowing in any way yet. The book so far has been a compendium of author's anecdotes regarding poorly designed things/systems/manuals/etc. I certainly agree with what he says, absolutely. At the same time though, it doesn't keep my attention because it just seems like story after story, no logical foundation that he's building for creating a well-designed product.

Here's to hoping it gets better!

blubonMay 6, 2019

That statement from Rich Hickey makes no sense at all, because we aren't born knowing how to play instruments. And if your brand new instrument is weird, then not many people are going to bother learning how to play it.

Thinking that "ease of use" should not be considered because [favourite reasons] is probably the number one misunderstanding software engineers have about humans. :) Please read Norman's "The design of everyday things", before accidentally making the life of someone miserable through software.

onlionAug 22, 2017

If you like that article, you might also like Donald Normans The Design of Everyday Things, https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expand.... It has a lot more examples for these kind of bad designs, and it also explains why these designs are bad and what makes a good design. I can't recommend it enough, everyone that ever might design a product or a GUI should have read it.

devilshaircutonJune 19, 2013

I hope this doesn't sound "unnecessarily rude" as an earlier poster characterized negative feedback, but I also found the design for Exec to be incredibly pedestrian. To be honest about my position, I do have a degree in design so I perhaps am biased.

That said though, I think the analysis is a bit glib. "Learn to draw"; "learn graphic design theory"; "learn how to write" - not really sure how this advice possibly can compare with the huge amount of lessons you accumulate from practicing design in college. The suggestion that reading "The Design of Everyday Things" is a significant step to becoming a practicing designer is overly simplistic. I would never presume that, for example, "Gardner's Art Through the Ages" makes you into a museum curator.

The idea that someone could become a designer in 6 months reminds me of things like get rich quick schemes, get ripped in 10 minutes a week videos, or as was cited in the article, "You Can Draw in 30 Days". It reminds me of this comic:

http://mccreavy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/owl.jpg

You can't draw in 30 days. It is said that professional cyclists don't reach their peak for 10 years. This is also the nature of design.

EDIT: Found a better link for the image I was referring to.

rahimnathwanionJune 9, 2021

A list I put together a while back: https://www.encona.com/posts/product-manager-resources

Overview books:

* Inspired

* The Product Manager’s Desk Reference

* The Lean Startup

* Agile Product Management with Scrum

Interview preparation (good for breadth, even if you’re not applying for jobs):

* Decode & Conquer

* Cracking the PM interview

Other good books for PMs:

* Hooked

* The Design of Everyday Things

* Zero to One

* Traction

timronAug 23, 2011

"If it’s becoming cool, then sure, you’ve got the hipster crowd who like to go about saying they were designing UX before anyone had heard of it. That’s great for those people. You know what? It’s even better for the rest of the world because now people know there is such a thing as user experience design."

Uh huh. It also means that every no-talent, former "business guy" with a strong opinion has latched on to the title, because they've realized that declaring themselves a "UX designer" allows them to get hired into plum, boss-everyone-around positions without having to go through the pain of learning how to write code or actually do graphic design.

There are genuinely talented designers out there, but the many of the "cool" kids who have glommed on to the movement in recent months have done little more than read The Design of Everyday Things, written opinionated blog posts (on blogs designed by someone else) and gone to trendy parties. But hey...it's great when there's a profession with vague/undefinable job responsibilities and lots of authority over the product features -- you get to take a disproportionate share of the credit, which makes that next UX Design gig easier to get! Maybe you can even become a product manager!

ScandiravianonApr 25, 2021

I really like "the design of everyday things" by Donald Norman. It's more focused on design in general, than what you're asking for, but I think the fundamentals of design is a prerequisite to become a good UX/UI designers

It teaches several ways to prototype design, how to evaluate whether your design is efficient, and how to develop a design oriented mindset

It not only helped me make better designs, but also made me a better coder, because I started thinking about my code as a product to be used by others

jppopeonJune 27, 2019

There are some good books out there... such as (slightly outdated) "Design for Hackers" and "the design of everyday things"

... But if I were going to recommend a place to start I think you need to start small... begin by going to dribbble.com or awwwards.com and look around... get a sense for what you like, and more importantly, try to figure out why you like it. After you get an idea and take notes on the subject... try to fiddle around with copying the things that you like => personal blogs are amazing for this.

As a developer you should understand many of the principles that will get you to a good design: reducing complexity, intensional organization, being of service to the user, iterating your way to better designs, getting feedback/ testing your work.

Last tip: get some skin in the game. Charge someone for design work... nothing lights a fire under your ass like having your reputation on the line ;)

pramodbiligirionAug 7, 2021

Refactoring UI was a great resource that was recommended on that Ask HN. The authors have a book and some videos. Very actionable and systematic advice. That formed the basis of my understanding.

For more specific techniques, the Learning Web Design 5th Edition (by Jenna Something) is very good.

I skimmed Don’t Make Me Think, which validated some of my own thoughts and helps you avoid silly oversights. I also read Design of Everyday Things but found it very lengthy and somewhat pompous. Not sure that I got much out of it.

On that page someone has linked to a bunch of MIT material. I didn’t check that out in detail. Might be good... I don’t know.

Thanks for the bug report on the modal. Would have never noticed as I navigate to my site directly and never click the Back button there.

JarwainonDec 19, 2018

I'm also hoping to prune my reading list of redundancy.

Right now I've got:

- Design Patterns by the Gang of Four

- The DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim

- The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim

- Designing Data-intensive Applications - Martin Kleppmann

- Peopleware - Tom DeMarco

- Code Complete - Steve McConnell

- The Mythical Man Month - Frederick P Brooks Jr

- Growing Object-Oriented Software - Steve Freeman

- Domain Driven Design - Eric Evans

- The Clean Coder: A code of conduct - Robert C martin

- The Pragmatic Programmer - Andrew Hunt

- Building Evolutionary Architectures - Neal Ford

- The Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman

- Don't Make me think - Steve Krug

zip1234onFeb 24, 2017

There is book called "The Design of Everyday Things" that discusses such things. https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/...
I don't even know if it is a cheap product thing as many of the cheap products are very usable. For example, light switches are very cheap. People place them in strange places or in strange orders and it makes them hard to use.

rayalezonJuly 13, 2018

Here are the best books I've read over the last few months:

- Lost and Founder - the founder of Moz shares his advice and experience from building a 40M/year company. I found the things he says about building a startup extremely insightful and practically useful. Reading it feels like having a dinner with a friend who shares with you the things he has learned in a very honest, down to earth way. Highly recommend it.

- Rationality from AI to Zombies - probably the most influential book I've read in my life, profoundly changed the way I think. It's a collection of LessWrong essays on science and rationality. (recently they've released an an audio version by the way).

- "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and "Our Mathematical Universe" - two general popular science books I'm enjoying a lot. Haven't finished reading them yet, but so far they're brilliant(and very easy to understand, authors do an amazing job explaining complicated things in a simple, accessible way).

- Hacking Growth - an AMAZING book on "growth hacking". It provides a framework for marketing a startup, gives a ton of practical advice and specific tactics. It breaks down step by step how startups and big tech companies grow their products. Most of the books I've read on the subject were bullshit, but this one is absolutely fantastic, can't recommend it enough.

Other great books I should mention: This Idea is Brilliant, Actionable Gamification, The Design of Everyday Things, The Master Algorithm (great overview of machine learning techniqes), Springfield Confidential (fun behind the scenes from one of the writers on Simpsons), Homo Deus(from the author of Sapiens).

mherdegonAug 2, 2018

Reminds me of Don Norman's kinda crazy light switches in his house, described in "The Design of Everyday Things":

> FIGURE 4.5. A Natural Mapping of Light Switches to Lights. This is how I mapped five switches to the lights in my living
room. I placed small toggle switches that fit onto a plan of the home’s living room, balcony, and hall, with each switch placed where the light was located. The X by the center switch indicates where this panel was located. The surface was tilted to make it easier to relate it to the horizontal arrangement of the lights, and the slope provided a natural anti-affordance, preventing people from putting coffee cups and drink containers on the controls.

codr7onAug 25, 2019

I'll add all of Edward Tufte's books, which are excellent both in content and presentation. The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin was also formative for me.

They complement each other well; Raskin being more technologically/psychologically oriented and formal, while Tufte takes on information design in general at a higher level.

And I second The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, it should be required reading for anyone designing anything used by humans.

hawskionAug 22, 2016

There is a nice book about things like this, but it is a bit dated. The Design of Everyday Things [1].

Devices are produced not to be useful, but to be sold. People want more value for money so they select a thing with more buttons (seeing a button for a function) or more splashing lights. Usually the cheapest devices of established lot are simple, but may be not energy efficient. Probably the flashiest are mid-tier and the most expensive are sometimes like good looking cheapest option, but more energy efficient.

I am thinking of getting big screen display. What I would prefer is to get computer monitor around 40-50 inches connected to my computer and Chromecast. For audio I would like to use separate appliance. Cheapest most effective solution is probably to buy TV (and it seems all of them are to some extent marketed as Smart) even if I don't intend to use most of it. Other option that I consider is to have 24-30" monitor on wheeled stand so I can easily pull it closer to couch.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

raphlinusonDec 22, 2018

"The Design of Everyday Things" is a great book, I enjoyed it.

Part of why I put it up with no instructions is to get feedback on how intuitive it is to use without any explicit instruction. I've gotten mixed response; some people seem to get it, others don't. So thanks for this bit of feedback. There's a basic help panel now.

eesmithonFeb 9, 2020

Here are more not-programming things.

Do you have early customers/friendly users? Have you done any UI testing? Paper prototypes? Do you have a clear idea of your users' goals?

While dated, read "The Design of Everyday Things" and "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum".

If you don't have users even to the level of being able to provide early feedback for non-functional UI designs, then you are probably doing too much coding and not enough user testing.

(That's easy for me to say, but there's a decent chance I'm wrong.)

jakelazaroffonMar 12, 2018

I'm sorry, I don't know of any online resources (and after googling, it seems the more common term is "quasimode") but I can heartily recommend the book The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. It's a seminal book on designing interactions between humans and objects, and was required reading in my human-computer interaction class in college.

snikolovonJan 27, 2011

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. It talks about good and bad design in everyday objects through lots of enlightening and amusing stories and examples (doors that look like you should push them but you actually have to pull, mixing boards with dozens of identical knobs, aircraft software that hides important state information, etc). It provides some interesting insights from cognitive science and psychology too. It definitely made me a lot more conscious of how I went about making things that people would use and how those things could effectively communicate through their design what should be done with them. This also had an impact into how I went about communicating in general.

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

throwawaybeebsonOct 3, 2019

What really gets my goat...

Working for a boss who's a dangerous cocktail of arrogance, incompetence, and is self-conscious of it. He's the kind of person who keeps a copy of Steve Jobs' biography and The Design of Everyday Things around his desk. If you ask him a yes-or-no question he responds with, well that depends. And if you ask him to clarify be prepared for a journey through tales of the south, hippie communes, anthropology, and how it all relates to the tragedy of choice and material design. He has an opinion about absolutely everything. He always tries to get the last word. He gives speeches about failure way too much. And if you get on his bad side be prepared for a word-tsunami. You will know it's coming because you can hear him typing furiously from across the office -- the little typing notification flickering on and off in Slack for ten minutes while he composes the final word.

He's the kind of person who will swear he's your friend and has your back. And in one on ones he'll make you feel like people are saying things about you. He'll put you down in front of your direct reports. Will insist on winning an argument even if he's obscenely, incontrovertibly wrong because he's too embarrassed to admit he doesn't know. He once told me that I wasn't using abductive reasoning and if I was smart I would be able to figure it out. I had asked him if we could cut one or two columns from a table in a view so that we could ship on time with a nice user experience after patiently explaining why. And he collected negative feedback from people about my work, without telling me, in order to throw me under a bus at an important meeting with advisors. Then he rolls with my ideas as if they were his own.

icebrainingonJan 2, 2016

Meh. If you read The Design of Everyday Things and then look around, you see so many faults with the UI of physical things, even some which have been around for more than a century.

A good example is packaging: "The Consumer Product Safety Commission estimated that attempts to open packaging caused about 6,500 emergency room visits in the U.S. in 2004."

chuckfoutsonJuly 24, 2010

This article is based on the premise that people correlate the number of features of a product to the simplicity of using the product. This isn't an accurate premise. A better description of the problem would be that features get added to products without much thought for how it integrates with usability. "The Design of Everyday Things" is a good book that addresses where and why design goes wrong. http://amzn.to/17Wew

rudedoggonAug 6, 2016

I look at this a little differently. If a user is able to make a mistake, I've failed (this is too broad, but you get the idea).

If you take an honest look at your application, and step away from it, it's usually easy to see how they misinterpreted something, etc. I think empathy is an important skill in developing software. It's not right to expect someone to change how they think about a task, because you've written the software to work in that way.

Good software and UX is hard. Modeling problems in a way a computer and a user can understand is hard. Browsing http://ux.stackexchange.com/ and reading some of "The Design of Everyday Things" opened my eyes to how bad things are - and how much better they can be.

Also, if you haven't you should watch some talks by Bret Victor or Alan Kay.

myguysionMay 7, 2019

UX is a huge field with a lot of entry points so it’s difficult so suggest a single resource to start with.

However I’d suggest that coming from an engineering background, you might find joy in learning about user testing first as that’s usually a big eye-opener that helps you understand why the field of UX design is important.

A classic book to start with is “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug[0], which covers usability testing and even how to conduct a session yourself.

Then there’s “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman[1], whom many consider the ‘father’ of the modern field of UX. That one can be a bit dense though.

If you want to think like a designer, then learning about Design Thinking[2] is a good place to start.

Hope that helps!

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited-Usability/d...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expand...

[2] https://www.ideou.com/pages/design-thinking

6renonDec 16, 2011

"The Design of Everyday Things" talks primarily about functionality, and frames design so broadly as to be almost indistinguishable from "solving a user problem".

As an example, Roy Fielding describes the URLs that a RESTful webservice includes in its representation of a resource (for what transitions are available to other states) as "affordances".
It could even be argued that Codd's relational model was a better "design" for thinking about databases, which he presented in terms of the problem of data models being too closely coupled with storage representation.

Of course, even this broad sense of design doesn't address whether there's a market for a solution; but it does address whether you can make a solution that's better.
I can see the sense in seeking a problem that needs to be solved - in being "market-driven"... but personally, I'm much more excited about creating something better (which is only possible when you already know the problem and some existing solution, because "better than" takes two operands). And that seems to be the history of all the products I admire.

mikestewonJuly 14, 2021

It's a thought straight from my butthole, but The Design of Everyday Things is a book recommended amongst this crowd, and one of the early chapters of that book goes on about doors. Once you've seen it, blah, blah, blah. Or perhaps the book didn't make any difference other than to validate what many had already noticed.

georgeecollinsonOct 5, 2020

Wow! I was his student many, many years ago. I had to take his class because he was the head of our department. I thought I was going to do something very different with my life and I wasn't very interested, except that he was a great lecturer. In retrospect he was easily the most influential professor I ever had.

If his work in something like "Design of Everyday Things" seems underwhelming I would guess that is because it has become so influential that you already have absorbed a lot of the ideas in the book. You certainly live in a world that is slightly shaped by them. As a teacher, Norman constantly taught through anecdotes about the way things work.

ATMs used to give you money and then after they gave you money they would return your card. The model for the bank was take card, do transaction, return card. The problem was people kept leaving their cards in the machine. Donald Norman pointed out that the "mental model" for people was go to atm-> get money. Once the last step is accomplished the customer doesn't thinks they are done. They don't want to keep thinking about the ATM. "Mental Model" of an interface is a term you may have heard and he coined.

Now every time I go to an ATM and it gives me my card back before the money, I think of him.

baylessjonJan 25, 2021

I appreciate your point about nothing ever being "100% due to human error", especially in regards to air travel. I recently read "The Design of Everyday Things", a book that devotes a lot of its time to discussing this same principle. We should blame the UX wherever possible before assigning any blame to the individual.

BjoernKWonApr 4, 2018

Apart from those already mentioned ("The Design of Everyday Things" and "Don't make me think") I can recommend this online course about various aspects of design:

https://hackdesign.org/

While not about user experience alone it's a great collection of useful articles about matters such as design in general, typography, user interfaces and user experience design.

SymmetryonOct 3, 2010

Trying to confine myself to books I haven't seen others mention:

"Guns, Votes, and Democracy" is a wonderful book about democracy in the third world and is both insightful and surprisingly readable.

"The Retreat to Commitment" is the only philosophy book I'd actually recommend.

"The Design of Everyday Things" is a book for anyone who makes or uses things.

"The Transparent Society" is a thought provoking book on the future of privacy.

"The Mystery of Capital" is a book on the importance of non-corrupt government in successful capitalism, a good point of view to have in addition to Rand.

"The Strategy of Conflict" on how to use game theory in the real world, and negotiations especially.

gattilorenzonNov 11, 2019

Well, the fridge needs to be opened, closed, has inner compartments, you need to be able to regulate the temperature, possibly to let the user know the fridge is running/which temperature is inside... all this happens in the kitchen, possibly with dirty hands, or with wet hands, or while you're holdin ga handful of things... that's all UX-related aspects.

The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman, had a nice example of how even the wheels for regulating the temperature can be very confusing (and indeed, in basic fridges you don't regulate the temperature, you set a number on the scrollwheel e.g. between 1-7. But is 7 a higher temperature or higher cooling power?).

joostersonMar 1, 2017

The classic design text 'The Design Of Everyday Things' praises the design of cars, and rightly so IMO. e.g. doorhandles are all intuitive and obvious how they are to be used, the knobs and controls are functional and well-shaped, etc.

Cars are getting worse as more things transition to touchscreens. As a driver, groping at a flat, featureless touchscreen to select something is far more difficult than trying to press a button.

bwh2onApr 23, 2021

Don't Make Me Think is a great book. Even though the example screenshots are from the early 2000s, the principles still apply. I recommend that book to all of my engineers.

However, I recently read The Design of Everyday Things and was really disappointed. The sections about door handles, stoves, and elevator buttons are interesting but that's only 1/3 of the book. The rest is about iterative design and system failure, for which there are better books like The Lean Startup and Drift Into Failure.

aplummeronNov 17, 2018

You might like the book "The design of everyday things" if you haven't read it already.

I find bauhaus design and understanding affordances etc much more interesting than abstract and non functional design.

As another note, usability testing with irregular computer users with a skeuomorphic design vs a "flat UI" produces such crazy results in favour of skeuomorphism.

poulsbohemianonJan 13, 2014

Yes! This one should be required reading for anyone managing people or projects. It's a bit like "The Design of Everyday Things" - it isn't necessarily the material in the book, but rather the patterns of questioning and thoughtfulness produced by the book that will stick with you. Peopleware is beyond being a "software" book - it's really about how to create an environment where professionals can thrive.

JugurthaonApr 16, 2021

Books, concepts, and mindsets that help build the right thing. Problem solving, design, design thinking, consulting resources.

"The Complete Problem Solver", "Change by Design", "The Design of Everyday Things", "Jobs to Be Done", concepts like non-consumption. Questions that confirm that feature requests are valid and avoid solving Y problem when the actual problem is X. Thought processes to prioritize work and focus on what matters.

Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26814150

Then books, concepts, and mindsets that help software engineers reap the reward of the software they write. Marketing, sales, prospecting, pricing, communication.

I believe there is a huge quantity of beautiful, idiomatic, code that solves no real problem, and a huge number of software engineers who have trouble monetizing their skill, or get stuck in unfulfilling roles because they have not found a way to shape an interesting one for themselves.

A few examples of threads searching for answers one usually answers through piecing together many resources, books, and life experiences:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26805216

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26650563

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26550896

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26465891

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26446169

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26366426

ftrsprvlnonSep 13, 2020

UX is often thought of as solving an issue "for the user", which dismisses or redirects attention from the communication problem onto the individual. No one reframes it, nor should they, as solving engineer/developer "laziness or stupidness". Reading "The Design Of Everyday Things" made me more aware and empathetic, from both perspectives, when I can't find the right button to click or have to think about which way a door will open.

davidghonDec 12, 2018

The Design of Everyday Things Is a masterpiece. The age of the book proves it. It is as relevant today as it was when written 30 years ago.

The only downside to the book is it will ruin every elevator, door handle and stereo amplifier you ever use. My wife tires of me explaining how a door that requires a “pull” sign is a major UX fail.

After reading the book it helped me understand the different models the creator and user have and has allowed me to recognize when I’m making design decisions that make a lot of sense to the creator and no sense to the user.

rchaudonDec 12, 2018

While I agree with your analogy, it is entirely possible to sink an inordinate amount of time into learning design theory with those books, and have absolutely nothing to show for it in terms of a real world website that reflects good design principles in a way that is apparent to the average web user.

I've read "The Design of Everyday Things"; I appreciate its role in providing a kind of philosophical grounding for HCI education. But if I were building product to compete in the same space as Robinhood, or Airbnb, that book wouldn't tell me a damn thing about how to design a UI that engages users. And increasingly, a lot of "engagement" comes down to whether or not the app "feels" like a premium experience.

Unfortunately that feeling isn't something you can recreate by reading about the circumstances in which a door would be designed to be push or pull based.

_0naconJuly 25, 2013

In case the name doesn't ring a bell, The Design of Everyday Things is an extremely readable introduction to usability, and an absolute classic in its field:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

You'll never look a door the same way again... particularly if it has a handle but still expects to be pushed open.

samlentsonSep 19, 2019

What about "The Design of Everyday Things" strikes you as stale? It's been a while since I've read it, but I don't remember feeling that way when I was reading it. That being said, I was just getting started, so I was doubtlessly lacking context.

Can you recommend a book akin to Desi...Things that you feel better describes "modern" design?

micktonJan 23, 2010

My personal peeve is door handles.

You know what I mean, you come to a door and you don't know if you should push or pull. It happens to me almost everyday at work when I'm deep in thought.

"The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman, nicely sums up a lot of design problems. Even tho the book was written in 1990 or earlier, we're still facing many of the same design problems.

Everything2 sums up the book nicely:
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=140365

d33onMar 6, 2017

On the quick I could think of two:

"Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman - essentially a book about "bugs" in our minds that lead us to bad decisions,

"The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman - changes the way you look at human-made things, makes you better appreciate examples of design that take functionality into account.

SaturdaysonFeb 5, 2019

The Design of Everyday Things makes me rethink every user interaction or problem I face, and not just at work. Every time I open a door, I begin to think about that experience.

Recently, Educated by Tara Westover, and in the past The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, both have taught me to approach individuals with the true ignorance of their lives that I have. You don't know where people come from and what life led them to where they are when you meet them. Try not to make assumptions. Additionally, I have to remind myself that I grew up loved, cared for, and privileged compared to so many other people.. the fact that I could read their story and post here is a testament to that, helps me try to stay down to Earth and that I had some advantages growing up that others did not.

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker... I used to be a chronic advocate for sleeping less until I read this and did my own scrappy post-research. I'm much more conscious of my health and my sleep now.

I could go on and on..

troymconNov 11, 2012

I'm reminded of the cover of that book, The Design of Everyday Things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

Looking at the photo of the store, the top halves of the two side walls seem to be flat and empty. Maybe they could put some nice-looking sound-absorbing materials on those walls?

hevi_josonDec 22, 2018

Hello Ralph.

It looks great but you should add some basic usage howto. It is obvious that you know how to use it, you created it, but other people do not.

The first time I used it it was very frustrating because I only created circle handlers, and said: This is sh*t!! Then I close the window and looked back at the sample image and saw square pointers, so I said: There must be some key that creates square pointers. After trying again I discover it creates square handlers by default.

This is the typical engineer mindset, after having spent years doing something they consider obvious what it is not.

Read "The Design of everyday things" for more design concepts if you are interested.

angusdavisonSep 4, 2011

That article misses the bulk of what good design is actually about. To quote Steve Jobs:

"Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer -- that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."

If you want to learn about design, before reading books about colors, fonts, grid layouts or how to make an inner glow in Photoshop, you should start by reading something like Don Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" to gain an appreciation for how things work, and why. Then worry about making them look good.

latitudeonMay 25, 2013

With all due respect for Tufte, his focus has always been on the presentation and visualization of the data. While this has an overlap with the design skills required for the end-to-end software design, the overlap is only partial and not even that big in many cases.

Also, the Dont Make Me Think book should've really been a two-pager pamphlet, it is really thin on a material. While the center idea is fundamental, it is very easy to explain and to understand.

If we are talking about 10000 ft perspective of the design and its fundamentals, I would raise you The Design of Everyday Things. This is a very good beginners book and it's also an interesting read for those who already know a thing or two.

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

_hardwaregeekonApr 24, 2020

I've advocated for a "canon" of books for software engineering and computer science that could be taught in school. The canon would accomplish several goals: it'd inform students about the less technical but profoundly important ideas within CS (Brooks' No Silver Bullet, The 10x cost incurred when moving from stage to stage in waterfall, how to treat and manage failure, etc.), it'd teach students how to think about problems (How To Solve It by Polya, The Design Of Everyday Things), and it'd provide history/culture (Coders At Work, Soul of A New Machine). One should, of course, learn how to program in a CS major. But there's diminishing returns on teaching programming in a class; ultimately students must make the shift from learning in class to teaching themselves. Perhaps teaching more of the "soft" aspects of CS would give better returns, especially as the students move up the ranks and start managing people.

BjoernKWonFeb 24, 2020

In "The Design of Everyday Things" Don Norman describes this distinction as knowledge encoded in the head versus knowledge encoded in the world.

For professional tools knowledge encoded in the head supported by appropriately encoded knowledge in the world absolutely is a viable approach, provided there's appropriate feedback and conceptual mapping corresponds to the mental model a user has about how that tool works, i.e. actions and reactions should be consistent.

With modal design patterns such as the ones used by vi, for example, this can become a problem.

j-g-faustusonApr 21, 2010

Along the same lines, Donald Norman (usability guru, started the usability field almost single-handedly with the book "The Design of Everyday Things") recently said:

"I've come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs."
http://jnd.org/dn.mss/technology_first_needs_last.html

You can't ignore customers completely. Apple discovered this with the Lisa computer in the 1980s, which apparently was amazing for its time, but at $10,000 found no market. Perhaps Lisa was the computer Jobs wanted for himself, but it turned out that few others were willing to shell out that kind of money.

On the other hand, it is clearly pointless to ask consumers how to design attractive or revolutionary hardware or software - you're the expert, you figure it out.

But this doesn't necessarily mean that you ignore target markets altogether - the iPad is innovative, but still clearly focused on a particular set of use cases with a price to make it competitive with netbooks.

nadiaconJuly 2, 2013

Oauth has been made to avoid to store passwords, but it is not a simple protocol to implement.
I just think you are talking here about the main debate between protocol versus applications/platforms.

- Protocols provide standardization, and independance, often as recipe/instructions to follow. Protocols keeps things open, into nodes not hubs.

- Applications/platforms provide easy comsumption, with a user design but also dependancies. It is like a menu to order, as you choose what you want to eat but you don't have to care about how to do it (the recipe). They mutualize things as code librairies, CPU etc... but are hubs, not node and close the network in counterparty of user experience.

To see in depth the difference of design between a recipe and and a menu, more explanations in the Donald Norman book " The Design of Everyday Things"

Edit: To see the difference between a protocol and an application, why people are using Gmail instead of STMP? User experience vs implementation

wool_gatheronApr 11, 2018

I don't know that their belief is a cultural problem, or at least one that's changeable.

The book "The Design of Everyday Things" has this idea that users of things fall into one of two broad groups:

a) users that want fine control and expertise, and are willing to sacrifice simplicity to get it
b) users that want simplicity, and are willing to sacrifice control to get it

I think that most issues of privacy and security boil down to the simple fact that most people are in group b (really, I think that's true of any issue you care to choose). They don't care, and they won't.

The cultural change that could make a difference is when the more secure, more privacy-positive options are also the easier and simpler choices.

sb636onJan 23, 2020

Designer here. Author makes some decent points, but misses the mark elsewhere. The post reads like a "developers idea of basic design tips."

- This post only touches on visual design. Important, but just a subset of what "design" is.

- Dribbble is very "artsy" and not typically as focused on practical product design. I personally dont think its beneficial to spend time there, unless like the author states, you're interested in emerging visual trends.

- The author doesnt mention the foundations of design, which is disappointing. Spacing, alignment, visual hierarchy. affordances, etc. If you're building an app without a designer its far more important to understand those concepts than how to design a logo.

My advice, depending on how much time you're willing to invest:

- Read "Dont Make me Think" by Steve Krug (2.5~ hour read)

- Read the first half-ish of "The design of everyday things" (4 hours?)

- You may balk at the length of those reads, but I promise you, spending one day to learn design fundamentals is an extremely valuable use of your time.

Common mistakes I see developers making:

- No attention to spacing consistency

- Not creating enough space between unrelated elements

- Not aligning enough things

- Weak visual hierarchy

- Misusing radios vs. checkboxes vs. dropdowns, etc

jasonhongonDec 12, 2018

(For background, I'm a faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute)

For best books, it depends on if you want to understand users or do implementation. But generally, I'd highly recommend Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things to improve how you look at the world, and Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think for simple and practical design tips.

For tools, the best is paper prototyping, where you have your team just draw it out on paper and simulate the UI. It's simple, fast, and cheap, and from a cognitive perspective, you can explore more of the design space (think breadth-first search instead of depth-first), and you don't get overly attached to your designs.

In my course on UX design, we also use Balsamiq and InVision, though other tools seem fine (e.g. Marvel, Figma, etc). One of our alums created this great chart comparing different prototyping tools: https://www.cooper.com/prototyping-tools

For schools, some to check out would be Georgia Tech, University of Washington's Master's of HCI, Indiana University, University of Michigan iSchool, and (of course) Carnegie Mellon's Master's of HCI.

And lastly, here's a slide deck I put together and used at my startup several years ago. It was intended as a short 1-hour crash course.
https://www.slideshare.net/jas0nh0ng/01-1hourcrashcourseuxhc...

QueensGambitonJune 28, 2019

Garry Tan (Former Partner @ YC) recommended these 2 design books as a must for engineers:

- Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

- The Design of Everyday Things: Donald Norman

If you want be a really good designer, he recommends 4 more books: https://www.collectoral.com/collection/101397753425638859326...

You might also want to watch his video on design for startups: https://blog.ycombinator.com/design-for-startups-by-garry-ta...

eloisiusonJuly 3, 2020

This article had lots of echos from The Design of Everyday Things. I highly recommend it if you haven't read it. Before I did "design" was a word meant mostly aesthetics with a little UX sprinkled on to me. This is 100% a design problem, and we have to design systems for people that are stressed, in a hurry, confused, think they are smarter than they are, you name it. The part about differentiating markings for active and passive crossings is especially poignant for me. I ride bikes a lot and cross numerous passive crossings on smaller country roads. It's not that I don't understand how those crossing works, but I'll admit that I often subconsciously think to myself, "they designed this not to kill me if I don't disobey the bells and gates" as I tear past it after a quick glance.

jfaucettonMar 20, 2018

Here's some books I would like to see on a coffee table.

1. An illustrated book of bad arguments

2. Maus by Art Spiegelman

3. Amano: The Complete Prints of Yoshitaka Amano

4. Chinese Calligraphy: 50 Characters to Inspire Peace and Calm

5. My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles by Gardner

6. The Illustrated Story of Art: The Great Art Movements and the Paintings that Inspired them

7. The Design of Everyday Things

facepalmonMar 3, 2015

Thanks. I already have the second one and it's great. But it doesn't make me a designer.

I'd like a course like the Coursera MOOCs that walks me through the steps (most importantly, makes me practice with homework on a regular schedule). Also the mundane details - what tools to use, for example (software, hardware).

To be fair I think there was actually a MOOC by the author of The Design of Everyday Things. I was signed up, but ended up not having the time :-(

icebrainingonAug 10, 2015

OK, so what does IA have to say about this problem? From what I remember about it (my course didn't have it, but I read a bunch in the early 2000s), it was more concerned about the overall organization of the information over the pages, and not with the specifics of how a menu should be formatted.

By the way, it's not "an" experience, it's "the" experience, and nobody would agree more with you about it being invisible than the coiner of the term UX - after all, Don Norman's seminal work (The Design of Everyday Things) was all about designing stuff to be more intuitive and fast to use.

KaibeezyonJune 17, 2018

OK. It doesn’t really go to your original post, but I often also point people to The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman, 1988, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Thing...

Basic insight into the question of: “What makes a good tool?” Maybe for your purposes, the angle is: “When is a simplified tool more useful than a complex one?” Or: “How can I add complexity to a tool while preserving its usefulness?”

mathattackonJan 13, 2014

The best non-Code development that I ever read was the Design of Everyday Things.

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

It was not written with software in mind, but the core respect for the user translates enormously well. If you can't tell whether you should push or pull a door to open it, it's the fault of the door designer, not the door opener. This translates very deeply into interface (user or technical) design.

sidedishesonMay 11, 2018

I think Norman's The Design of Everyday Things rings incredibly true to this story and its lessons.

There are so many examples in that book where users, frustrated or inconvenienced by the (high-tech) complexity of their tools, devise their own (low-tech) way to use a tiny subset of the features that just barely gets the job done for them--though perhaps not as creatively as writing on the screen here. One is the emergence of scrappy post-it-note instruction guides for basic tasks people would tape next to overengineered phone systems in the 90s. He also presents the concept of a 'gulf of evaluation' that makes contextualizes the difference between designer expectations and actual use (or the difficulty of getting feedback that would bridge this gulf).

The book---in its latest version, intentionally---omits discussions about modern software, but it does more than enough to prove its point with simple everyday examples. I'd highly recommend giving it a read to anyone!

wheelsonMar 3, 2008

- Introduction to Algorithms (MIT Press). This is the only one of my computer science textbooks that I consistently refer back to. It's elegant and timeless and covers a lot of ground.

- Design Patterns. Dry, boring, useful. You can skim it and get most of the ideas. The best part about it is building up a vocabulary for discussing common patterns with other software engineers.

- Programming Perl. Ah, the camel book. It's possibly the only written-by-the-language-designer reference that's fun to read. Regardless of what your favorite scripting language is, you have to love Larry Wall.

- The Mythical Man Month. Another classic. Easy to read. Stuff people should know, but don't.

- The Design of Everyday Things. Not really a programming book strictly, but a nice introduction to the principles of usability. If you can get over the slight smugness, it can shake up the way you think a bit.

yellowstuffonMay 22, 2018

A classic that hasn't been mentioned yet is Doug Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things". My main takeaway 10 years after reading it is that a bad user experience, even one so subtle that the user doesn't notice, can usually be prevented by careful design.

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

estebankonJan 20, 2014

Read "The Design of Everyday Things". A touch LCD screen in a car is a demonstrably worse solution to car controls than old fashioned knobs and buttons that you can use while keeping your eyes on the road. I also see in that picture that the Tesla has a full color speedometer, which is a bad idea because it adds flair around the only thing you really care (current speed/rpm/is something broken?) and unless it has a night mode (which I have every reason to believe it does) it would be very bad for your night vision.

It sure looks slicker, futuristic and trendy, but it's nothing but a gimmick. Also, who needs to browse the web on a car? But I digress.

bad_useronNov 25, 2011

Thanks,

I also read "Don't Make Me Think", but I haven't included it (in this article) because I don't consider it a good book. It felt like some examples were just wrong and I also couldn't take away much value from it, although I may have been biased by my opinions on the matter. Its other flaw is that it bored me after the first third or so.

Also, "The Design of Everyday Things" (included) does talk about the psychology behind user actions. It's pretty good.

kthejoker2onAug 9, 2019

My own humble suggestions - although the books are hardly forgotten. But I think people focus a lot on technical / engineering books, and very little on design / user experience / human behavior, which arguably contribute much more to the overall impressions end users have of programmers' work.

First, the greatest book of all time, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - an amazingly introspective and insightful look into how to live an examined life and improve oneself.

And then if you want to learn lower-case "design thinking", my top 10 books

* Design for Everyday Things - duh. I re-read chunks of it all the time.

* Tufte - hard to pick one, I might actually be iconoclastic and go with Visual Explanations which I think has more to offer programmers over pure data visualization. Again, just grab one every day, flip through 3-4 pages, rinse, repeat.

* User Story Mapping - Extremely memorable book - it gives you a pretty clear field guide on prioritization, empathy, communication ... just a great book.

* Badass by Kathy Sierra - I flip through this book again and again. It is gospel truth about what motivates humans.

* The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design - IDEO's most practical book. (Close second: Designing Interactions.)

* Universal Methods of Design - another deeply practical book, lots of good tips and examples.

* Universal Principles of Design - Sister book to the Universal Methods. Again, straightforward, flip to any page and get an idea when you're brainstorming.

* Thinking in Systems - I recommend you skim this book through, but come back to it a lot, it grows with you.

* Inspired by Marty Cagan - again, love nuts and bolts process books.

* Don't Make Me Think! - still a classic, still see these mistakes being made all the time in modern app dev.

adwfonFeb 8, 2014

Sure, it was Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug. Quite good, although just a basic short intro book on web usability. I'm generally hopeless at design, so it's given me quite a few ideas. Namely remove 80% of the wall of text on my site!

I've also picked up The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman. Haven't got around to reading it yet as it's not about the web, more just everyday design and usability, but it came highly recommended.

dredmorbiusonNov 30, 2019

Yes, he is. I'd heard the name, mostly in the context of The Design of Everyday Things. But going through his publications, there's a hell of a lot more there:

https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3ANorman%2C+Donald+A.&q...

I've extended my reading killer asteroid of death somewhat over the past day or so.

(It is most definitely no longer a list, pile, tower, or mountain.)

I was also stunned this particular essay hadn't been previously discussed on HN.

jkapturonSep 19, 2019

I was underwhelmed by this book. I think that so many of the practices (like version control) have become so popular that reading an argument for their use seems superfluous.

That also makes it really jarring when it recommends something that decidedly hasn't taken off, like the blackboard design pattern.

I had the same experience reading "The Design of Everyday Things". To some extent, these books seem most valuable as historical artifacts of what the tech world was like thirty years ago, rather than current references.

maxprogramonSep 2, 2017

Poor Charlie's Almanac -- can't beat Charlie Munger when it comes to explaining how the world works.

Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile -- Nassim Taleb reviles lots of new ways to think, first in finance, then everything in later books.

The Origin of Wealth -- Similar to Antifragile with a lot of mental models packed in on many different subjects: economics, business, biology, ...

The Design of Everyday Things -- the bible of design. Read it to know why everyday frustrations with tech are probably not your fault. His book Emotional Design is a good compliment.

The Essential Drucker -- "essential" reading for anyone in management or scaling a startup.

History, and why the world is the way it is today:

Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari

Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond

The Birth of Plenty, William Bernstein

They Made America, Harold Evans -- fantastic history book with each chapter telling the detailed story of a businessperson or inventor in U.S. history

dr_dshivonFeb 12, 2020

Distributed cognition is a really powerful idea that breaks a lot of our assumptions about individuality and agency. When applied to something like AI, I think it promotes much better thinking about how to get productive work done -- since it isn't so much about the algorithm as the system as a whole.

I recommend Ed Hutchins book "Cognition in the Wild" or Don Norman's "the design of everyday things"

Other related ideas are "the extended mind" and "actor-network theory". It is hard not to come to the conclusion that personal identity is useful for drivers licenses but ultimately a very elaborate social illusion/myth.

I really like the implications for reincarnation, though!

mcantoronMay 31, 2011

Another good book to read along this vein is The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. He talks a lot about designing things which afford being used correctly; that is, you can't help but use them the right way, just based on the way they work. His favorite anti-pattern is the "Push" door with a "Pull"-handle on it, or a "Pull" door with a "Push"-plate on it. The door, like the programmer's interface, exposes more options than are relevant to the actual use case.

This is actually a very empowering mindset: If you push a "Pull" door, or pull a "Push" door, you are not the moron! In fact, it is the person who put a "Pull"-handle on a "Push" door! This viewpoint turns PEBKAC on its head. If a user runs a script that he thinks will configure his bootloader, but instead it erases his filesystem, who is the moron? The user, or the process which produced a script that can be run in a way that will erase your filesystem?

The worst offenders I've ever seen in this vein are Atlassian. The admin interface to their products, particularly JIRA, is basically a glorified database query GUI; there is no indication how each of the parts fit together, and 9 out of every 10 possible configurations you can create are actually broken.

The problem is that you can't design a better interface without thinking about how other people will actually use your app, and that's extremely difficult. However, it's useful to look out for signs that you are Doing It Wrong. The "programmer's interface design" from the article is one of them. Another is the phrase "Well, at some point, somebody might want to..." If you hear this phrase repeated frequently during discussions about feature or interface design, panic! It means you don't know what your use cases actually are.

This is one of the ways I think Agile development can be extremely helpful, but no one seems to practice it in a way that leverages this type of benefit. Thinking about things in terms of user stories forces you to make these kinds of decisions, and you almost can't help but design the interface better.

beenBoutITonSep 14, 2018

Two books.

"The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. Norman

The Design Bible. This book gave me objective ways to explain what would have previously been my "negative opinion".
Coming to grips with the reality that bad design is rampant reinforced my growing interest in product design.

"PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story"
by Dr. Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin

The Phenethylamine Bible. As a kid I was fascinated by Shulgin and his work advancing science for all of these genuinely good and positive reasons. I watched politicians with no understanding of science use hype to outlaw all of Shulgin's fascinating chemicals against the recommendations of experts in their relevant fields. Shulgin's work is open source and the 2nd half of PiHKAL was my first exposure to open source code.

meeritaonJan 3, 2014

In no particular order:

What Would Machiavelli Do? The Ends Justify the Meanness

1984

Farenheit 541

Foundation (all saga)

The Hobbit

The Lord of the Rings (all saga)

The Prince

De Bello Gallico and Other Commentaries

The Design of Everyday Things

The Riverworld (an entire saga of 5 books)

On the Good Life

Treatises on Friendship and Old Age

Asimov On Numbers

Asimov on Chemistry

The Roman Republic

And hundreds more I cannot list.

thereddestrubyonDec 15, 2010

To answer your questions:

1) The same way a programmer learned to program.

2) Yes. As practice, draw from real life everyday.

3) If you want.

4) If you want.

5) I recommend reading Drawing on the Right Hand Side of the brain, Don't Make Me Think, and Design of Everyday Things to start.

6) Whatever you feel works best for you.

jsnkonNov 6, 2015

Whenever I read someone write about UX about anything, one common quality I spot is how negative the writer is about the object in discussion. They all take the tone that they know something more than the people who created it. Have these UX people given any considerations to countless number of factors involved in something seemingly simple as installing a urinal?

Immediately questions sprung up for me. Has the writer thought about possible regulations surrounding installation of urinal in millions of localities around the world? How about the regulations of manufacturing urinals? There's also countless rules surrounding import/export laws for 200s countries around the world. I'm not even accounting for interstate laws within US and other countries. This was just grand legal issues alone. Consider availability of time before deadlines, experts who can install the urinal, money budgeted for urinals and bathroom space, etc... You can imagine countless situations where even installing "subpar" urinals are actually really hard.

My criticism also extends to the book that started it all, The Design of Everyday Things. It's such a simplified platonic world view, I couldn't take the book seriously. The condescending tone of voice the author had was really annoying as well.

_hardwaregeekonMay 9, 2018

Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug and The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.

While they're not strictly software or programming related, I really like the concepts of making interfaces that require minimal thought to use and empathizing with your users. I've seen an unfortunate amount of "programming machismo" where a confusing or poorly engineered system is used and accepted because "that's just how things work in the real world". And whenever someone struggles with the process, it's obviously because they're wrong, not the system. But more often than not, if more than one person has trouble understanding your system, whether it's an API, a website, a build process, the design is the issue.

meeritaonDec 24, 2013

A good read would be "The design of everyday things" by Don A. Norman. It explains how brain works, and how to design by using map techniques and user tests.

A resume, when design:

1. Use both knowledge in the world and in the head.
2. Simplify the structure of tasks.
3. Make things visible.
4. Get the mappings right.
5. Exploit the powers of constraints-Natural & Artificial.
6. Design for Error.
7. When all else fails, standardize.

There's a lot of books in the matter of UI but they can fall either in the philosophy side or either the personal taste of the writer.

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

shpxonMar 5, 2016

The Design of Everyday Things. Probably the quintessential book on design, the basic premise is that if you can't figure out how a thing works, it's not your fault.

Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down. About the engineering of various things, mostly buildings. Highly recommend.

The Elements of Computer Systems (better known as NAND to Tetris). Describes a computer from the bottom up.

A History of the Arab Peoples

The Quran

The Bible

Space and Time in General Relativity by David Mermin

Feynman QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

jacobolusonMar 14, 2014

> Cars, toilets, old-school dial telephones, doors, blenders, paper books, hammers, bulldozers, can openers... have vastly disparate user interfaces, but no one complains about having to learn them all,

Some people do complain. Many versions of the common objects you mention have really stupid interfaces, which cause delays, mistakes, and lots of frustration.

I highly recommend Don Norman’s book The Psychology of Everyday Things (later editions retitled The Design of Everyday Things) which analyzes such objects (doors, telephones, cars, refrigerators, faucets, stoves, etc.) and concludes that many of their interfaces are horribly broken.

wreelonSep 3, 2010

I think you're side stepping the point of the article which wasn't that he was arguing for complexity in design but that the general public has a tendency to "worship false images" as Don would put it. That is the impulse when comparing two products side by side in a department store setting is to go with the one with more knobbies and twiddlies. Sure there may be one with simpler interface but the purchaser may equate that to "less capable".

It's all related to marketing.

A way that sellers of products that do have simpler interfaces get around this is either with lots of literature or very thorough product demos. People here may want to use the Apple brand as counter examples but that's wrong. Instead of complexity in the design of the product the complexity is in use. Demonstrated with lavish expos and advertisements. They're still selling you on capability.

But not every product manufacturer has accessibility to that kind of marketing prowess. The best you can hope for your widget in the department store is built into your product. And that means the product has to sell itself. In that case, as a designer for that widget, it would be good to know that simplicity is overrated.

- By the way. You should really pick up "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don.

lhnzonFeb 26, 2014

I think you miss the point.

Being modularised allows the basic user experience to be kept very simple. It does not need to grow into something like an IDE. Hell, according to Packages [0] even tools like find-and-replace have been modularised so I do not think it follows that Github would carelessly decide to create a big ball of mud!

And additionally this tool has removed barriers that previously existed before.

Since it was created by Github they will be able to expose APIs to create features which are currently not possible.

Likewise the UI being implemented with WebKit means that the user interface can tightly represent what a user is used to seeing at different stages of their development process.

You might have read "The Design of Everyday Things" [1] before. There are certain elements which you need to control to create a good user experience: (1) discoverability, (2) feedback, (3) the conceptual model, (4) affordances, (5) signifiers, and (6) mappings. Without ease in changing the UI, and the possibility that Github will have self-interest in exposing extra APIs, it would be a lot more difficult to control for each of these.

It's just an opportunity to try new ideas. I'm not suggesting that this would be preferable to everybody.

[0] http://atom.io/packages

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...

adolphonJuly 14, 2021

Not this:

The term Norman architecture is used to categorise styles of Romanesque architecture developed by the Normans in the various lands under their dominion or influence in the 11th and 12th centuries. In particular the term is traditionally used for English Romanesque architecture. The Normans introduced large numbers of castles and fortifications including Norman keeps, and at the same time monasteries, abbeys, churches and cathedrals, in a style characterised by the usual Romanesque rounded arches (particularly over windows and doorways) and especially massive proportions compared to other regional variations of the style.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_architecture

This:

Donald Arthur Norman (born December 25, 1935)[2][3] is an American researcher, professor, and author. Norman is the director of The Design Lab at University of California, San Diego.[4] He is best known for his books on design, especially The Design of Everyday Things. He is widely regarded for his expertise in the fields of design, usability engineering, and cognitive science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Norman

fusiongyroonSep 8, 2012

I think you just made timr's whole point. You could have just said "the UX guy runs the observational research and supervises wireframing and usability testing" but that just doesn't sound like a FTE.

For what it's worth, my experience matches timr's: if you get a developer and a designer to each read "The Design of Everyday Things" you'll get further and go faster than you would by adding a full time UX expert that can't design or code to the team.

rmc00onJuly 2, 2009

I've been asking the same questions lately and trying to find the answers. The problem that I've run into is that a lot of designers just feel what is right. It seems very instinctive, which makes it hard for them to pass on knowledge.

One designer that I found who seems to know and actively apply principles of good design is cameron moll (http://cameronmoll.com). Cameron gave a great talk a while back at the HOW Conference, and he posted a pdf to accompany the talk http://cameronmoll.com/archives/2009/05/free_download_good_v.... I think this document is a great starting point to learn about design. Obviously, a 10-page document doesn't cover everything possible, but it recommends a few books for learning more. I haven't been able to pick them up yet, but I suspect you will find them helpful.

1. How Designers Think by Bryan Lawson
2. The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
3.Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler
4. The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman

timc3onJan 15, 2013

It seems a week doesn't get by without a post or two in Hacker News about GUI design or graphic design, often entitled something like "Design for Hackers" or "Design for Developers".

The trouble with all these posts is that they are trying to shortcut the methodology of design by various hacks, even something as lengthy as read 5 books is by-in-large a hack.

There is no substitute for practise, for looking and appreciating your world in a different way (this can be self-taught, I will discuss more below) and for in-depth thinking about what either comes down to communication or feedback problems.

Aesthetics largely is difficult to teach and learn and comes from confidence and a place in the brain that is hard to hack, but communication and interaction is learnt from early childhood by everyone - it just needs opening up and awareness of this as we mature.

By looking at the Design of Everyday Things (the book or the things around you) you begin to appreciate or notice the failures in signs, handles, buttons, phones, car controls, packaging and if you are tuned into this way of thinking it can be hard to stop considering the amount of interactions with “things” we have everyday.

Then taking this body of knowledge that is learnt one can then start objectively looking at one's own design and interaction problems, using the same tools that you have been using to analyse potential problems as they occur and working them out to find the best solution. But knowledge of the best solution will also come from practise of working with the constraints of whatever medium are working in (for example print, application, touch screen, architecture or furniture design).

This practise will mean mistakes - this is an important part of the learning process, just as it was when growing up, you will learn what works and doesn't work and in the future intuitively work with this in mind.

specialistonMar 8, 2017

Young me took a very different lesson from Feynman's investigation of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

The fundamental human problem is governance in the face of entropy and information overload.

Also known as the The Politics of Attention.

I'm still trying to understand the width and breadth of failure. Starting with Drucker's Managing in Turbulent Times thru Norman's Design of Everyday Things up to now's study of Why Smart People Do Stupid Things.

Sadly, I have no idea how to mitigate it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report

incongruityonMay 26, 2016

The Psychology of Everyday Things (later retitled "The Design of Everyday Things") is indeed a great book. I call out the original title, first, to be a hipster but more to point out that his very aim was to talk about things not Human Computer Interaction. It is not a book primarily about Human Computer Interaction and your regarding it as such or at least lumping it in with HCI shows a serious misunderstanding of the larger point.

It isn't that you can think of many things as interfaces it is that many things are interfaces and interfaces were around long before they became graphical or even digital/computer-based. So, URLs themselves are definitely interfaces – they're UI's and machine interfaces as well, given their multiple roles.

For the concept of Dark Patterns, the manipulation you're talking about is, at its core, abusing convention, expectation and perception to steer people into an experience that they wouldn't choose if it were more obvious. So, essentially, dark patterns are deceptive.

What I gather you're asserting is that they must also be manipulative and get people to do something, themselves? By that bar, I think the imgur returning of pages instead of images when the convention is to return an image for a url ending in .jpg, etc. may be questionable. No URL request will ever rise to the level of nuance that a visual interface will. However, I still think this case fits. It is abusing a set of conventions and intentionally guiding a user into something they weren't expecting.

Additionally, think about the multiple use cases here. It's easy to focus on the casual browser clicking a link from Reddit but it's also about the user creating the reddit post. They are following convention, using what they think is an image link, choosing to post it, only to then unwittingly be involved in serving up that annoying as hell moving cat paw ad on top of the image they're trying to share with others. That sounds a little like a dark pattern at work to me...

losvedironMar 8, 2012

Well good for you for trying an experiment about it.

You might like the book The Design of Everyday Things which is about issues like confusing elevator buttons.

I just flipped through my copy, actually, because I wanted to quote a passage at you, but I couldn't find it so I guess I was wrong: I had thought one principle of good design was a one-to-one mapping of interface features to functionality. Two buttons doing the same thing would break this concept, but maybe it's not a principle after all.

plainOldTextonDec 12, 2018

Don Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things has indeed altered how I look at the world from a design perspective. It teaches you design awareness, and you'll find yourself noticing and understanding design elements all around you, that you didn't before. Even though it might seem a little old, the information presented in there is timeless, so I highly recommend it as well. It is in fact the first book I would suggest to anyone wanting to learn how to think like a designer.

I recently got his other book, Emotional Design, I just haven't gotten to it yet.

ColinDabritzonMay 17, 2015

This is a specific critique about the usability of the Unix shell, and I think most of this is still valid. The inside jokes (less is more) and overloaded meanings of command names is still an issue today, for example. Some of the visibility has improved by various means, but overall there is still a fair amount of 'black box' that takes arcane knowledge to peek in to.

Naming is one area I appreciated Microsoft's approach in Powershell. They have command names with a Verb-Noun structure, and full clear words, sometimes quite long. Then, after establishing clear canonical forms for the commands, they add a few well chosen aliases for short invocation and memorization.

Of all the critiques though, the Cognitive Engineering objection, that the system is not well designed to be used by human capacities, is still true across many platforms, especially in esoteric areas like the command line.

Also interestingly, I am guessing that this is the same Donald A. Norman of 'The Design Of Everyday Things'. It's fascinating to see these ideas in flight in 1981.

How do we address these things? How does one "redesign Unix" today?

jamesbrittonSep 5, 2011

If you want to learn about design, before reading books about colors, fonts, grid layouts or how to make an inner glow in Photoshop, you should start by reading something like Don Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" to gain an appreciation for how things work, and why. Then worry about making them look good.

This is a book that developers should read because it helps you think about thinking, and is applicable to APIs and other software internals.

Warning: If you read this book you may find yourself distractedly aware of the UI faux pas circus that surrounds us (e.g. doors that have handles that look pull-able, but can only be pushed).

If this book can get even one designer to resist the urge to make screen UIs that look like glass bubbles or brushed metal the world will be a better place.

mcantoronJune 29, 2009

More suggested reading: "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman. http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d... -- I've lost count of how many times I've read this book. As the article goes, it talks about what it really means to be intuitive, and how common objects fail miserably at achieving that goal.

pchristensenonJuly 10, 2008

Single Page link: http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/6354

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance - Henry Petroski (Knopf, 1989)

Mirror Worlds; or, The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox…How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean - David Gelernter (Oxford University Press, 1991)

A New Kind of Science - Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Media, 2002)

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas R. Hofstadter (Basic Books, 1979)

Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age - Paul Graham (O'Reilly, 2004)

The Design of Everyday Things - Donald A. Norman (Basic Books, 1988; paperback reprint, 2002)

The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder (Little, Brown, 1981)

The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing - David Kahn (Macmillan, 1967; revised edition, Scribner, 1996)

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time - Dava Sobel (Walker, 1995)

The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster, 1986)

plainOldTextonApr 29, 2016

* Design Mockup Tools

In the past I used Keynote for its simplicity, now I prefer Sketch. It's nice to be able to preview your designs on your mobile devices. These apps are for Mac only though.

* Books

One book I would recommend on design is "The Design of Everyday Things". You'll learn a few useful things about design in general.

Another book I'm reading right now is "The Process of Creating Life". I cannot recommend it yet as I haven't finished it, so I'm just mentioning it. This book might seem like an odd choice at first since it's from the architecture shelf, but it has some interesting ideas nonetheless.

One thing to mention is that the topic for both of these books is not digital design, yet I would argue that the knowledge learned from them is transferable to the digital realm.

twfarlandonSep 1, 2011

The dichotomy of 'design vs code' feels artificial to me.

The activities of designing and of coding overlap extensively. Both require a clarity of communication, a deep consideration of the purpose of the thing to be designed/built, and a sense of taste.

If in the habit of extracting general principles from concrete examples, coders can become better coders by learning aspects of design and vice versa.

Many of the concepts in a 'coder' book like 'How to design programs,' for example, are readily applicable to UX design, e.g: refactoring, wishful thinking, generalisation of purpose, and the control of complexity by use of 'black boxes.'

Likewise, a 'designer' book like 'The design of everyday things' is full of stuff that applies usefully to the activity of coding, e.g: the importance of meaningful feedback, and of ensuring a clear mapping between expected actions and their outcomes.

These correlations aren't everywhere to be found, though. But I've always found interdisciplinary people to have the freshest approaches.

hcarvalhoalvesonAug 18, 2013

Try to learn and understand design as a discipline before going into the specifics of user interfaces and interaction design. For that I recommend:

- Universal Principles of Design - William Lidwell

- The Design of Everyday Things - Donald A. Norman

Then for more practical knowledge:

- Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability - Caroline Jarrett

- Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability - Steve Krug

- Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web & Mobile Application Design - Robert Hoekman Jr.

- Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design - Bill Buxton

pmontraonJune 9, 2018

We'll see if the touchscreen gets any traction. I'd like to point out that this is perhaps the only non Mac laptop that has a 15" screen and doesn't have a number pad. The keyboard is aligned with the center of the screen and the space bar is almost there too. Joy!

I could buy this laptop only for that, even if with Linux I'll probably have to wait the next laptop before the touchscreen is of any use. But no, the RAM is capped at 16 GB and I'm using 32 GB on my HP laptop (several projects for several customers, each one with a different language and environment.)

However my 15" laptop has a useless (for me) number pad with the result that I have to shift it half to the right to be able to keep my hands in front of me and not skewed to the left, which would probably do nasty things to all my upper body. This is the norm for all 15" laptops and I wonder if their designers stopped at the cover page of Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things", with the famous teapot for masochists, and deluded themselves into believing that this is the right way to build stuff.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/...

nathan-muironJuly 2, 2015

The Design of everyday things [1] (Found on Coding Horror's recommended reading [2]) was crucial in understanding how people intuitively interact with the world around them - including your web application - based on the visual cue's you provide.

While this article provides some metaphorical fish - I found the Design of everyday things helps you become a fisherman.

EDIT: Swapped the order of references.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expande...

[2] http://blog.codinghorror.com/recommended-reading-for-develop...

ekianjoonJan 15, 2013

Because the author of the post probably has a very narrow vision of what the term "hacker" means. And putting "every" and "should" in the same sentence makes it sound like it's some kind of universal advice worth gold or something.

I know 2 of the books mentioned and they are great books, but the poster should mention that the Design of Everyday Things is starting to be seriously dated. At least for the examples exposed - the principles do not age.

jfaerge171onNov 19, 2020

When I first read the DDD book almosty 15 years ago, I think it took me 2 or 3 reads to get it into my head. I really like the first half that can be used purely for a design perspective, and the second half for communicating with the business people to do business domain modelling .

Other books I really like are

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, it is a good read and lets you talk to a lot of UX'ers as I have found more than a few that have used this book for their thesis.

Enterprise Integration Patterns by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf, which is old but in world of streaming procesing a lot of the patterns can be reused.

The Site Reliability Engineering books or their free counter parts found on https://landing.google.com/sre/books/

edited to add a couple of newlines.

erikpukinskisonMar 6, 2017

This is mostly graphic inspiration. For interaction design:

"Thoughtless Acts" by Jane Fulton Suri is one of the best. Pages and pages of photos of objects as they are actually used, rather than what they were designed for, gives deep insights into use.

"Design Research" by Brenda Laurel is an exhaustive collection of design methods, which you can pick from to solve almost any specific design problem.

In my opinion, those two books and The Design of Everyday Things are all anyone needs to know in order to be a better interaction designer than 99.9% of professionals.

aswin8728onJan 24, 2017

PM @ McKinsey & Company (New Ventures group)

-Background in software engineering and human-centered design. The best product managers I've been around have a mix of technical, business, and design talent, with the strong PMs excelling in at least two of the categories.
-Understand the difference between good and bad products. Actively examine products you use on a daily basis, both physical and digital. E.g. why is my shower setting designed this way? why did I push on a door that needed to be pulled? To flex this muscle, read "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman and check out Tony Fadell's tech talk on product design.
-Be a people person. You need to be able to communicate product ideas clearly to everyone from marketing to HR to engineering (obviously).
-Be entrepreneurial. You're the "CEO" of the product, so you need to know the product/service inside out. Everything from the software stack down to the marketing materials to the help center articles should have been on your radar at some point in the release cycle.
-Protect the engineers. Don't let management demand too much and be vested in their success.

Ping me if you have any other questions :)

eswatonMar 2, 2014

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman [http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...]

Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web by Lukas Mathis [http://www.amazon.com/Designed-Use-Create-Interfaces-Applica...]

Don’t Make Me Thing by Steve Krug would have been my third.

I don’t believe any of these emphasize minimalism, and I’m not sure what help you’re looking for in that regard?

thedevilonMar 27, 2017

I've got a tie between two books:

1) Design of Everyday Things
by Dan Norman

This book ruined my life. I highly recommend it. Every engineer, manager and designer should read this. Maybe every human. I think of this book every time I try to pull a push door, every time I reach the bottom floor of a stairwell and notice the design that might save my life one day, and every time I try to struggle to operate a television or a microwave.

2) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
by Robert Cialdini

This book helped me understand myself and everyone else. For example, I now understand why I double down on dumb ideas. I also catch a lot more marketing and sales tricks.

Edit: Sorry, just now realized that I broke the 1-book rule, but it's probably too late to correct this and it's really hard to choose between these two anyway.

borskionJan 15, 2013

The Design of Everyday Things literally changed my life back when I read it in high school. To this day, I've never been able to look at doors the same way.

But seriously, everything I see nowadays that frustrates me in its design immediately harkens back to a principle in The Design of Everyday Things.

Truly transformative book - couldn't recommend it enough.

ernonOct 7, 2011

Not to diminish the genius of Woz, but it should be pointed out that in a design book (I think it was The Design of Everyday Things) his CORE universal remote was singled out for harsh criticism because of its overly complex UI.

Based on this, there may be some truth in the idea that he lacked some UX finesse.

bhouselonNov 29, 2009

An "action possibility". In other words, something in the design that lets the user know that you can do something.

Once you start to think about affordances, you'll see them everywhere where good design is present. The classic example is with doors. If they have a knob, you know to turn. If they have a plate, you push there. If they have a vertical bar, you expect to pull on it. You can probably figure out how to get through the door without the affordance, but it would be frustrating.

Look at some other objects around your house, especially kitchen, and think about the clues that the designers have given you to know how the objects are to be used.

Edit: I highly recommend the Donald Norman's
The Design of Everyday Things for anyone interested in an introduction to design concepts. Classic book, and a worthwhile read for software developers too.

brianmwangonDec 23, 2010

This hits home for me since I just finished reading The Design of Everyday Things. The two improvements that Jason suggests can be traced back to some core design principles that Donald Norman lays out in his book:

1. An indicator to inform the user of the object's current state. Based on the comments in the original post, it seems that the dishwasher actually does have an indicator light but for some reason it was accidentally covered up.

2. A forcing function, which is meant to constrain user actions in order to prevent error and/or guide the user toward the intended behavior.

btillyonMar 29, 2010

I don't know what you mean by "related to software". I'm going to take a narrow definition that you mean related to the process of writing, designing, tracking, etc. So something like Information Rules on the economic theory of pricing software products is OK. Or a classic on managing software developers like Peopleware is OK.

Some other general business books I like include The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution and First, Break all the Rules. A non-software specific design book I highly recommend is The Design of Everyday Things. Even though it is geared towards manufacturing related industries, I'm also very fond of Winning at New Products.

If you haven't already you should learn more about negotiation. Even if your only negotiation is negotiating a new job every several years, reading a book on it is very worthwhile. If you can negotiate yourself an extra $1000 bonus, once, the book has paid for itself with interest. The two books I recommend there are Start with No and Bargaining for Advantage. I'd recommend the first if you need a general purpose bargaining strategy and aren't experienced. I'd recommend the second if you're an experienced bargainer who is looking to improve.

A few years back I read The Prince by Machiavelli. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.

For general interest for anyone who likes math I strongly recommend The Mathematical Experience by Davis and Hersch. My summary of it is that Godel, Escher, Bach is the book that non-mathematicians have on their coffee table book, while The Mathematical Experience is the one that mathematicians have.

Lots of people gave sci-fi recommends for you. To those I'll add Peter Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction series and Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series. Furthermore if you haven't seen it yet, go to an IMAX and see Hubble 3D. If you ever dreamed of space, you need to see it. Really.

For random science fact, I like Jared Diamond. I like virtually everything by Stephen J. Gould. I recently re-read Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and still love that.

I could list more, but that's enough for the moment.

JeffJenkinsonOct 7, 2010

It's worth checking out Don Norman's (the author of The Design of Everyday Things) recommended reading list:

http://www.jnd.org/recommended_readings.html

I have yet to choose a book from the list that didn't leave me feeling much more informed. If you click on a book in the list it jumps to a description of why he thinks someone should read it.

I desperately want to get the Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics, but it's just way too expensive:

http://www.jnd.org/recommended_readings.html#000235

trotzkeonJuly 9, 2008

On my desk:
Getting Real (37Signals),
Hardball (Chris Mathews),
Prioritizing Web Usability (Jakob Nielsen)

Nearby shelf:
The Design of Everyday Things,
Maverick,
Founders at work,
A Brief History of Time,
A Pattern Language,
Peopleware,
Made to stick,
Web Standards Solutions,
Designing Interactions,
The Pragmatic Programmer,
The Mythical Man-Month,
Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Other good reads:
Blink,
Tipping Point,
Long Tail,
Freakonomics

finonFeb 5, 2010

hey david,

i first looked at hecl, and it looks alright for a programming language site

there are a few easy things that would make the site look and feel above-average:

(1) behavioral: a click on the orange box should take you to / - logos are links to the home page by convention, and users (and me) get confused, when they are not

(2) style: make the relation between navigation and content clearer by
(2.1) adding whitespace between the orange box and the actual content, so that it becomes clear that navigation and content belong together
(2.2) extend the highlight of the current navigation item to the far right of the navigation box, so that it "touches" the content (tabs are always "connected" to their content, and you're basically doing vertical tabs here)

(3) get rid of the "links" headline and the bullet points in the navigation (css is your friend there)

(4) whitespace is your friend, even in the example images - the right example looks very crowded. read the osx interface guidelines (or, less preferrably, the gnome one) for examples of good interface

(5) distinguish _somehow_ between internal and external links in the navigation. i first thought that that was the difference between bold and non-bold entries in the navigation - but apparently, it's not.

disclaimer: i'm not a designer by trade, this is just what i picked up during my studies (independently and on university) and by working together with designers

if you want a good introduction to design and a good read at the same time, read "design of everyday things" and look for slides of user interface design lectures - many teachers put them online!

hope that helped

kthejoker2onNov 20, 2017

Always go back to the classics

* The Design of Everyday Things
* Design for the Real World
* A Pattern Language
* Notes on the Synthesis of Form
* Never Leave Well Enough Alone
* Don't Make Me Think
* How Things Don't Work
* Usable Usability
* The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
* A Theory of Fun for Game Design

Other left-field books I've found myself going back to for design inspiration more than I would've thought

* The Death and Life of Great American Cities
* The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
* Influence by Robert Caldini
* Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
* The Art of Looking Sideways
* Cosmos
* Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
* The Theory of Moral Sentiments

And just specifically for computer UX, Smashing UX Design is a pretty good crash course.

vizvamitraonJune 3, 2017

"The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman.

Technically this book is about how humans interact with things, but actually it covers a lot more topics that one can think: how humans act, err, how they make descisions, how memory works, what are the responsibilities of conscious/subconscious. Also you'll start to dislike doors, kitchen stoves and their disigners)

mortenjorckonDec 12, 2018

I don’t teach UX design, but if I did, Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things would be the first assigned reading. I’ve even recommended it to friends who aren’t looking to transition into design, but just want a better understanding of the discipline for the occasional departmental web page, etc.

If you want to focus on visual language, iconography, and how graphics communicate, an unconventional, yet highly-regarded choice is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. What Norman does for interaction, McCloud does for visual communication (and does so, appropriately, in the form of a comic book).

roymurdockonMar 16, 2016

Older Stuff: The Bible/Quran, The Republic (Plato), The Social Contract (Rousseau), Tao Te Ching (Laozi), Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides)

Newer Stuff: Nine Stories (Salinger), The Razor's Edge (Maugham), Nausea (Sartre), Siddartha (Hesse), Road to Serfdom (Hayek), The Book (Watts), Design of Everyday Things (Norman), Atlas Shrugged (Rand), Invisible Man (Ellison), Debunking Economics (Keen), Blood Meridian (McCarthy), The Center Cannot Hold (Saks), This Time Is Different (Reinhart/Rogoff), Infinite Jest (Wallace), Calvin and Hobbes (Watterson)

All of these books are well written and have given me some perspective on interesting people/situations/ways of thinking.

btschaeggonDec 22, 2019

There's an audiobook version of "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman.

The book per se doesn't have much to do with programming per se (at least directly), but Norman describes a couple of mechanisms how humans interact with tools and describes some simple formalisms around them. I personally believe that it's a very useful book to have read (or listened to) if you're going to write any software that humans interact with -- be it UI driven or APIs.

shadowmatteronOct 8, 2010

These are exactly the two books I was going to recommend. Don't Make Me Think is like the K&R of web UX books, and Designing the Obvious is like a nice web 2.0 companion for it.

Also, I'd throw in The Design of Everyday Things -- see http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d.... It was written long before anyone ever thought of web usability; instead, it focuses on the usability of things you interact with daily in real life. Let's just say that you'll never look at teapots or door handles the same way again...

contingenciesonApr 3, 2017

This week I've started reading The Design of Everyday Things after HN recommendations, and the author makes a distinction between objects themselves, and their 'conceptual models', which may differ for the designer and the user. A single user may even have multiple, conflicting conceptual models of a device and its use. These are sourced from what he calls the 'system image', or overall set of information available about the device including past experience, appearance, sales literature, manuals, websites, advertising, etc. Needless to say, people can operate successfully on an incorrect mental model as long as it serves its purpose.

PS. Australian here. Yes, people do speak like that, but I agree with your conclusion.

rantfoilonApr 13, 2008

If I had to expand my list, I would include:

"Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman
"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Edward Tufte
"Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug

Tufte will give you the vocabulary around visual concepts. Norman will give you the vocabulary around evaluating basic usability. Krug will apply both to the domain of the web.

Additional recommendations:
About Face 3.0 -- written by the head of Cooper Design, it outlines in somewhat dry fashion the frontiers of user experience process. Buy this only if you're desperately interested in becoming an interaction designer, or you want to institute user-centered design in your organization. It's really the UCD bible.

swamp40onJuly 25, 2013

Another great quote from the book:

The same technology that simplifies life by providing more functions in each device also complicates life by making the device harder to learn, harder to use. This is the paradox of technology.

The paradox of technology should never be used as an excuse for poor design.

~ The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

mseebachonDec 4, 2012

I once got a recommendation for "The design of everyday things" (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman...) with a warning: It will break the world for you, because you'll go around noticing how things are designed counter-intuitively, requiring large signs to explain what should be obvious. A good example: "Push"/"pull" signs on doors. Multiple branches of humanity independently developed the ability to design doors that any other human that understands the concept of a door can figure out how to open. Then, suddenly, around 50 years ago, that knowledge apparently vanished, and we started to have to put big "how to use" instruction stickers on one of the simplest and most intuitive objects ever invented.

og1onFeb 5, 2010

Learn to wireframe and sketch out your websites ahead of time. It is much easier to try ten different layouts on paper than starting them in css. Some people like to mockup in photoshop, but I prefer paper. It is just faster for me.

Some people already mentioned "Non-Designers Design Book" - Robin Williams

Some other good ones are:

"Design of Everyday Things" - Donald Norman (Conceptual, but gets you in the right mindset)

"Dont Make me Think" - Steve Krug (Usability matters)

"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" - Edward Tufte (he has a set of 4 books on information visualization, all of which are good)

One of the key concepts that I've taken from these books is that everything in a page has a visual weight so you must consider how everything in a page balances out together. Never add stuff just for the sake of adding it, because it will distract the user from the information they are trying to gather.

And most of all just build more websites and try to improve each one. Design is still a lot like programming. If you dont like the particular look of your site you can refactor it. I know you don't get the benefit of seeing it, but some of the best designed sites out there have gone through multiple iterations.

mcantoronOct 28, 2011

This is in line with the philosophy espoused in Donald Norman's book, "The Design of Everyday Things". Mr. Norman phrases it as, "a product ought to afford being used correctly", that is, one cannot help but use it without being confused or reaching a stopping point, simply due to the nature of its design. His prototypical counter-example is the lovingly-named "Norman door", which is any "PUSH" door having a handle, or any "PULL" door having a push-plate. "PUSH" and "PULL" signs are essentially FAQs that make up for the "poor design" of a door that does not afford being used correctly.

estebankonMar 18, 2015

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned "The Design of Everyday Things"[1], talking about human interaction design. It makes the same points, a few decades earlier so there're no references to mobile apps, but the distilled take away are the same ones:

* Be obvious

* Avoid extraneous "ornaments" in the interaction

* Understand what your user needs

Of course those three bullet points do not make the book (either of them, I assume) justice, but you might want to read Donald A. Norman's book first. Another book you might be interested in is Don't Make me Think[2], which is specifically related to software UI design.

I agree with the point that using smartphones for everything is a step back. Having touchscreens in cars is also a step back. We went from having controls that could manipulated without taking the eyes on the road to fancy futuristic UIs that require either for you to be parked, to have a companion or do something potentially dangerous.</rant>

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...

[2]: http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/032134...

sgorayaonNov 4, 2008

Love to read - I used to read a lot more fiction, but as of late, have been reading a lot of non-fic to include magazines like Scientific American, The Economist and Harvard Business Review. My current reading list includes the following books, currently on my desk at the office:

Good in room by Stephanie Palmer
About giving good presentations and pitches

The design of future things by Donald Norman
Many of you have probably read or heard about his previous book, 'design of everyday things'

A class with Drucker by William Cohen
Lessons learned by a former student of the renowned business/management professor Peter Drucker

mindcrimeonMay 29, 2017

Gosh, there's so many. But these come to mind:

1. Neuromancer - William Gibson

2. Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

3. Hackers - Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Steven Levy

4. How to Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard

5. Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter

6. The Pragmatic Programmer - Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas

7. The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder

8. Code - Charles Petzold

9. The Shockwave Rider - John Brunner

10. Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become
Book
- Peter Morville

11. Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug

12. The Design of Everyday Things - Donald A. Norman

13. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering - Fred Brooks

14. Decline and Fall of the American Programmer - Ed Yourdon

15. Cube Farm - Bill Blunden

16. The Philip K. Dick Reader

17. The Cuckoo's Egg - Clifford Stoll

18. The Prince - Niccolò Machiavelli

19. The 48 Laws of Power - Robert Greene

20. The Atrocity Archives - Charles Stross

21. Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System - Bill Gates

tuhinonMay 13, 2011

At the risk of being seriously down-voted in a Hacker dominated community, please read the following:

Not a designer? Here’s how to make your web apps look awesome

A) Please hire a designer. You might hire someone who is not very costly and fits your budget but I cannot over emphasize the value someone who does this day in day out brings to the table.

OR

B) If you were a designer and wanted to build something, what would you do? Use one of the million ready made coding junks like "Digg Template" or "Twitter template"? No you know very well that innovation does not work that ways. You would pick up a book and learn to program or find someone who knows it and will help you.

Just because "everybody" thinks they can design or make things "look" good, it does not mean it is design. Read a few books like the following to get started:

1)The Design Of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman, Don Norman (basics of design)

2)Visual Grammar by Christian Leborg (basics of visual design)

3)Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works by Erik Spiekermann (typography)

4)Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach To Web Usability by Steve Krug (basics of UX)

5)Understanding Comics by Scott Mccloud (basics of storytelling- useful in web interfaces too)

6)The Visual Display Of Quantitative Informations by Edward R. Tufte (useful in information design and dashboards)

If you have read them and want to learn more, please feel free to contact via my HN Profile.

InnocentBonMay 12, 2011

Donald Norman (of The Design of Everyday Things fame) talks about the various strategies for this in his newest book, Living With Complexity. It's an interesting problem because it turns out enough people follow the antisocial strategy of taking from the larger roll (what Berners-Lee calls K in his protocol) that both rolls will often run out within short intervals of each other (less than µ).

Norman proposes the strategy of "nearest roll first" instead of "smallest roll first", which is an easier strategy to accommodate through toilet paper dispenser design. Many public stalls hide the spare roll inside a contraption for this purpose.

mbostockonJune 26, 2014

Thanks. The textbooks I used in school were /Algorithms in C/ by Robert Sedgwick (now just /Algorithms/) and /Introduction to Algorithms/ by Cormen et al. For visualization, I mentioned /Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think/ in the article, which is a compilation of classic papers in infovis. Also Tufte’s /The Visual Display of Quantitative Information/. And for design, Norman’s /The Design of Everyday Things/. But more generally… just read everything you get your hands on, find something else if it’s impenetrable, and learn by playing.

acidburn4onDec 22, 2016

The Teachings of Ramana Maharshi - Arthur Osborne

Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman

The Prince - Nicollo Machiavelli

Being Mortal - Atul Gawande

High Output Management - Andrew Grove

Elon Musk - Ashlee Vance

Red Plenty - Francis Spufford

The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway

Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari

The Four Agreements - Don Miguel Ruiz

The Inner Game of Tennis - W. Timothy Galleway

My Gita - Devdutt Pattanaik

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Istanbul - Orhan Pamuk

The Stranger - Albert Camus

warfangleonFeb 6, 2012

Advanced HVAC for commercial buildings perhaps, but not for homes. Every thermostat I've seen that can do half of what Nest is doing is covered in about 50 buttons, and the ownership manual is a 70 page behemoth. It's like every thermostat manufacturer out there read The Design of Everyday Things and decided to do the exact opposite.

shmageggyonDec 18, 2012

I think Don Norman's book "The Design of Everyday Things" is largely about exactly this, and it could even provide a simple heuristic for whether or not a specific skeumorphism is worth keeping or just kitsch:

Does the additional design (whether a gradient, bevel, shadow, etc) indicate an affordance? That is to say, does the extra stuff that is being layered on serve to tell the user something about what the UI element is for. For example, a slight gradient and bevel on a button informs the users that it is meant to be pushed, as it looks a bit raised up relative to its surroundings.

This, to me, is the biggest thing missing from these flat designs. There's nothing left to indicate whether something is a button, a panel, or whatever else. It's been stripped down so far that crucial UI hints have disappeared. As other commenters have pointed out, I think moderation is the key.

andosonJune 24, 2011

I offer you a few gateway drugs:

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by E. R. Tufte;

The Elements of Typographic Design by R. Bringhurst;

The Design of Everyday Things by D. Norman;

Don't Make Me Think! by S. Krug.

Beware of Tufte. Using charts to abduct engineers into the world of design is just dirty.

drcubeonJuly 25, 2013

I've never read this book but of course now I have to.

I'll suggest reading Henry Petroski's stuff, too. "The Evolution of Useful Things", "The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance", and "To Engineer is Human" all make the case that the design of things around us are shaped less by insight and more by evolution, incrementally building on the mistakes of the past.

If "The Design of Everyday Things" is half as interesting as Petroski's books, I can't wait to read it.

JtsummersonAug 27, 2020

  Fiction, English

Listening: Swords in the Mist, Fritz Leiber. Third in the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser collections.

Reading: The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin.

  Fiction, Spanish

I’m trying to learn Spanish. I’ve picked up a few Spanish language fiction books, presently starting on Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal. I’ve tried reading other books, like Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones, but I’ve found it to be above my present level. I’ve restarted four or five times and made it further each time, but always stalled out.

  Non-fiction

The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman.

I have other books started lying around the house, but these are the ones I’ve been actively engaged with in the last couple weeks. When I can type properly again (two to three weeks) I’ll resume Lisp in Small Pieces, Christian Queinnec. And at the office I have The Pragmatic Programmer, I’ll be back there next week and bring it home so I can continue with it.

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