Don Norman’s “The Psychopathology of Everyday Things” provides an insight into the world of design. More specifically, he covers some important fundamentals regarding industrial design and makes you think about how we as humans interact with objects in our day-to-day lives. When I’m doing something as simple as typing on a keyboard, I don’t really think about the keyboard itself. This reading has me questioning the design of things I use every day, such as this keyboard, and how they were made to be functional and visually appealing. Norman starts this reading by talking about something we’ve all interacted with – doors. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pushed on a pull door or vice versa; but thankfully after this reading, I don’t feel so guilty about it because Norman suggests it’s the designer’s fault, not mine.

Beyond doors, Norman begins to discuss designs of modern devices, a bit more technological than a plain door. I found the section about “The Complexity of Modern Devices” to be particularly interesting. Norman stated that “By human standards, machines are pretty limited,” (p. 5). Personally speaking, I feel like I tend to think the opposite of that statement. I’ve always thought that there are so many things machines can do that I would never be capable of, but upon reading this I realized I was failing to consider personality and years of life experience that simple machinery can’t replicate. I had to laugh when I came across his statement that “…machines usually follow rather simple, rigid rules because of behavior” (p. 5) because of how ironic it was to my current situation. I thought it would be helpful to click the “read aloud” button on the pdf until I realized that the machine did not have a reading cadence similar to how a regular human would read the passage, instead it just robotically listed off all the words on the page, including random numbers embedded in the page that I could not even see were there. All this to say, I think I was giving machines a bit more credit than necessary, and that this was a real-time example of machinery just following rigid rules because they lack an important feature that humans use every day: common sense.

More importantly than my struggle with doors and machines, Norman uses this chapter to introduce the four fundamental principles of interaction, which are as follows:

Affordance

Norman describes affordance as “the relationship between a physical object and a person,” (p. 11). From my understanding, this is essentially the basic functionality of an object. Take sunglasses for example: sunglasses help to shade our eyes from the sun, so a pair of sunglasses affords to block brightness. In the digital world, many if not all accounts, emails, etc. require a password. A password affords privacy from our personal information. Granted, a password is only as good as the user makes it, so a commonly used or easy-to-guess password does not afford privacy.

Signifier

The purpose of a signifier, as described by Norman, is to “communicate where the action should take place,” (p. 14).  He further explains that a signifier is “any mark or sound, any perceivable indicator that communicates appropriate behavior to a person,” (p. 14). The first example I thought of for a signifier was a parking lot. Parking lots have lines and symbols all across the pavement that indicate where you can park your car, or if a spot is handicap only. Without these lines to indicate where you can park, parking lots would be a free-for-all. Another example of a signifier is the cursor on a computer. The little arrow signifies what you are hovering over with your mouse or trying to click on. Cursors are a visual representation on the screen of where you are moving your mouse from your desk.

Mapping

Norman defines mapping as “the relationship between the elements of two sets of things,” (p.20). I think the simplest example of mapping comes from the buttons on the side of your phone, also known as the volume buttons. Everyone knows that if you want to increase the volume on your phone, you would press the button on top. On the flip side of that, to decrease volume you would press the button on the bottom. Norman describes these types of controls as natural mapping, which means “taking advantage of spatial analogies” (p. 22). Another example occurs when you open the camera on your phone. Within the camera app, there is a big screen showing what you are looking at. It is very apparent to users that the big button located under the screen is used to take the picture because of the relationship between the screen and the button.

Feedback

Feedback is quite possibly the simplest principle of the four because it is already a term we are familiar with. Feedback tells us the result of an action. There are examples all around us, but let’s go back to cameras. When you take a picture on a camera, it makes a clicking noise. We know the camera took a picture because it communicates to us with a click as the result of our action. Speaking of clicks, if a user is clicking something on a website, they are often met with a spinning circle, also known as a loading symbol, in return. This lets the user know that the computer received the action from the click, and it is communicating to us with a loading screen in response.

Source

Norman, Donald A. “The Psychopathy of Everyday Things”. The Design of Everyday Things. MIT Press, 2013, pp 1-25.