don norman the design of everyday things

Was the new mapping too jarring because it changed the conventional mapping that had been used across Mac and Windows for decades? Or was it more natural because it mapped to how you would push a piece of paper up to move it down and also matched the new behavior created on mobile phones. The controversy here is really about a mapping. This reversal more closely mapped with the way we used iPhones and iPads. Instead this was reversed such that you would drag your finger up on the trackpad to scroll the page down. This reversed the familiar pattern of scrolling a page down by holding your fingers on the trackpad and dragging them downward. We’ve seen a shift in major apps like Facebook away from hamburger menus and back toward tab-bar menus to improve the visibility of their key experiences.Īpple shook up the world in 2011 when it introduced natural scrolling to Mac OS X Lion. While the hamburger menu provides a convenient place to store a variety of menu items in a mobile app, it comes at a huge disadvantage: the lack of visibility of the contained menu items. The trade-off between hamburger side-bar menus and tab-bar menus in mobile applications is a very recent design debate centered around this very principle of visibility. Equally important is the opposite: when something is out of sight, it’s difficult to know about and use.Īs simple as this principle is, designers still struggle with adopting it. Visibility Visibility is the basic principle that the more visible an element is, the more likely users will know about them and how to use them. So I wanted to walk through each of Don Norman’s six principles of designing interactions and how they remain relevant to designing digital products today.

I still reference these principles daily in my work designing Notejoy.

Don Norman is one of the leading thinkers on human-centered design and the principles he writes about are required reading for every product designer. He then applies these universal design principles to designing technology products. In this classic work, Don Norman sheds light on the design of every day objects like doors, stoves, thermostats, and more.

When I first started learning about product design, one of the most influential books I read was The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.

Don norman the design of everyday things