The Design of Everyday Life

Yes, this is a play off of the title of Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. No, I’m not done. Yes, this is still a plug.

I’m only a couple chapters in and wow, this book touches on so many of my interests: technology, design, human behavior, business, and their interconnection. I won’t delve too much into the details and rob you of the opportunity to hear it from someone who’s lived it for decades, but I do want to share some of my takeaways.

The first and most salient point is that everything is designed. We tend to think that only creative disciplines design; sometimes it meanders its way into other disciplines. But in reality, we design everything from our curriculums, legislation, daily routine, Medium articles, ways of overcoming our annoyances, the layout of our rooms, our online presence v. our professional presence v. our social presence. We mold our external environment to reflect how we feel the world should be. It is in this projection that problems typically emerge.

“Never trust the end user,” is not an uncommon sentiment in my field. In many consumer-facing fields, it’s easy to look down on the user for deviating the intended use. After all, we are damn good at our job. The designated path couldn’t be more crystal clear.

The truth is, difficulties arise as a fundamental flaw in our understanding of out users. Norman makes countless opportunities to remove blame from the users and redirect it to the designer, stating, “Do not blame people when they fail to use your product properly.” Instead, designers should “take people’s difficulties as signifiers of where the product can be improved.”

Essential to great design is great communication. It is in these moments where the user has lost her way or is confused, that we have to provide gentle ways to lead them back on track or assure that we’re looking out for her.

Imagine for a second doing some online shopping. You put in your billing and shipping information, click the check out button, then — silence. After what feels like minutes later, you are taken back to the home screen. It’s not until you go to your email to register a complaint, that you realize that you have a confirmation email. This uneasiness is due to lack of feedback and transparency, all of which could be solved with a loading animation and confirmation screen. (Contrived example, but I feel like it demonstrates the point.)

Communicative design is good design.

This should be an entirely underwhelming realization. I’m sure everyone unanimously agrees that quality communication is the key to success. Yet, we consistently seem to forget. (I intend to write a full post on communication, so I’ll spare you here.)

These realizations have some pretty sick implications. This grants us a pretty good metric for establishing effective design across the board. We can analyze the strengths and shortcomings of essentially anything. We also inherit many methods of problem solving and design thinking, allowing us to identify the root cause and consequently create delightful, user-centered solutions.