According to Donald Norman, hidden frustrations are always present, even in everyday things. In his book, “The Design of Everyday Things” Norman discusses this topic. I believe his thesis is “Warning labels and large instruction manuals are signs of failures, attempts to patch up problems that should have been avoided by proper design in the first place.”
This book is made into seven chapters which are easy to understand for almost any user. Also there are two prefaces, notes, more readings, references, and an index. I think the organization is good, because if somebody just wants to know about the psychology of everyday actions they would just have to read one chapter. Also this book has interesting prefaces and conclusions that explain the author’s feelings, ideas, and opinions and provide references for those that want to do farther research or read more books about this topic. Each chapter is not too long. This book does not just give examples about design; things like a running man dropping a ball are also explained. Also a lot of visuals are used to help people understand the concepts being explained.
The argument provided in this book is that everyday things such as computers, TVs, and telephones all have hidden frustrations which make them hard to use or operate. The author supports this argument by giving lots of examples of frustrating things that happened to him, his friends, and others living in the US or Europe. Also each of the seven chapters in this book focuses on one main point from the thesis, which it explains. For example in chapter one, author focuses on the psychopathology (study of mental disorders) of everyday things. In chapter one Norman talks about frustrating design. In this chapter he provides an example about how his friend was trapped in a doorway of a European post office and then explains how this could happen, and how he designer wanted to make the doors beautiful, not easy to use. In addition, the author provides several other examples such as the front/rear speaker selector of an automobile radio and a seat adjustment control in a car and tells the difference between the two and how one is easy to use and the other is difficult. In the second chapter Norman explains who people usually blame for things that go wrong. The third chapter talks about the information that is necessary to figure out what is right, and human memory. Chapter four is about knowing what to do in different situations, while chapter five talks about human mistakes and errors. Chapter six covers the design challenge, and how designers work to keep producing new models of the same things (not always improved). The last chapter focuses on user-centered design and things design should do, such as make use of constraints make things visible and easy to evaluate.
In my opinion this is a good book not only for designers but also for regular people who have had troubles with modern technology. The author does a good job focusing his book on the thesis, supporting his argument and organizing his text. People who read this book will have a new way of looking a design and will find it easier to deal with frustrating technology. Also this book will let people see what they can do to make modern technology easier for them.
