Design of everyday things
Author: Don Norman
Notes:
- Never criticize unless you have better alternative
- Norman’s law: the day a product development process starts, it is behind schedule and above budget
- A large percentage of fault is incorrectly blamed on humans when we should really be thinking about the design that allowed the failure
- The concept of knowledge in mind and knowledge in the world. Try and keep the cognitive load low by pushing more and more info in the world
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Most of the time as soon as a project starts its already behind schedule and over budget
- A lot of interesting examples of good / bad designs, but the author took a long time to explain the theory and reasons. It got a little boring for me
- Although, the book was not directly written for software design, I can extract a few key ideas that I think can be applied when thinking about writing manageable code
- The book places heavy focus on Human Centered Design