There were a number of books and other resources recommened to me as a student int he Google UX Design course. However, it was this one that stood out, so upon finishing the course, I immediately went out and got a copy.
What I found interesting about this book before I even cracked the cover was its description as found on Amazon:
Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door.
The fault, argues this ingenious — even liberating — book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization.
The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time.
Having read the book now, I can confidently say that I have a better grasp of functional design, as it applies to both real-world, phyical objects and those applications we interact with in the digital domain.
That said, this book is not all sunshine and rainbows. Perhaps it is because I come from a background of reading a diet heavy in fiction, this tome of a book was often as dry as an overcooked steak. That isn’t to say that it wasn’t useful, but when I set the book down, I would find myself dreading coming back to it, which is not the reaction an author wishes to evoke in their readers.
I am glad to have read it, for, as I mentioned, there are a great many lessons to be learned. I especially enjoyed the multitude of examples the authors used, both from history and from his personal life. These were the rare cracks of light between boulders of technical terms that allowed me to consume blocks of the text at a time.
All that to say, I do recommend this book to designers, though I assume if you are a designer, you have already plowed through this book yourself. But my recommendation comes with a caveat: know that this is no light read, that you will not breeze through it, but for all the work it takes to read, the time is worth the effort.
