How Don Norman Ruined My Life (And Why I’m Grateful)
Let me start with a confession: I wish I’d never read “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman. It ruined my life. Not in a dramatic, life-altering way, but in the quietly maddening way that only a really good book can. Ever since I read that book, I can’t look at a shower, a stove, a light switch, or even my iPhone without mentally cataloguing all the ways the design could be better.
Take hotel showers, for instance. They’ve become my nemesis.
The Puzzling Shower
Picture this: I’m standing in a hotel bathroom after a long hike in the Welsh hills and I’m desperate for a hot shower. Facing me are three identical dials. Three dials, three water outputs (bathtub, handheld shower, rain shower). The middle dial is the only one with any guidance — little text for hot and cold water. Fair enough. But the other two? Complete mystery meat navigation. I had no choice but to pick one and see what happened, like some kind of bathroom roulette.
It turned out the right dial controlled just the bathtub. Simple enough. But the left dial? That little troublemaker controlled both the handheld shower and the rain shower, depending on which direction you turned it from the center. Turn left for handheld, right for rain shower. Because that makes perfect sense, right?
Then there was the shower in another hotel with two outputs and a dial labeled simply “1” and “2.” Not even an attempt at an icon or symbol — just numbers that told me absolutely nothing about what would happen when I turned them.
This is what Norman would call a complete failure of signifiers — those crucial design elements that tell us what to do and where to do it. Instead of clear communication, I got a guessing game with hot water.
Design Roulette Everywhere
But showers aren’t the only culprits. Suddenly, I was seeing bad design everywhere. Light switches that don’t map logically to the lights they control. Curtain controls that work in the opposite direction: push “up” to make them go down. Stove tops where the burner layout doesn’t match the control layout — a classic Norman example that I now encounter regularly.
Even my beloved iPhone, supposedly the gold standard of intuitive design, is full of hidden affordances that Norman would probably shake his head at. Tap the top-right corner of the screen to jump to the top of a page. Swipe down from different parts of the top to access different menus. Double-tap the spacebar to add a period. And don’t get me started on answering calls with AirPods — I still haven’t figured that one out and constantly forget the gesture when a call actually comes in.
It’s like the entire world is designed by people who never have to actually use the things they create.
The Curse of Design Awareness
This is what I call the curse of design awareness. Once Norman opens your eyes to affordances, signifiers, mapping, and feedback, you can’t unsee bad design anywhere. Every poorly labeled button becomes a personal affront. Every confusing interface feels like a failure of empathy.
You start to realize how much mental energy we waste every day just trying to figure out how things work. How many small frustrations we accept because we assume we’re the problem, not the design.
But I started noticing good design too. Take my Mercedes — the seat adjustment controls are a perfect example of intuitive mapping. The buttons are shaped and positioned to mirror the actual seat adjustments. Want to move the seat forward? Push against the button. Need to adjust the backrest? The control tilts exactly like the seat back would. It’s so logical that you don’t even think about it.
That’s when I realized that good design isn’t just about avoiding frustration — it’s about creating little moments of delight. When something works exactly as you expect it to, when the interface disappears and you can focus on what you actually want to accomplish, that’s design working as it should.
The Simple Fixes That Change Everything
The beautiful thing about understanding design principles is realizing how often simple solutions can solve complex problems. Most of the design failures I encounter aren’t fundamental flaws — they’re just missing signifiers.
Those confusing shower dials? Add clear icons showing which controls what. The meaningless light switches? A simple label or logical positioning would solve everything. The hidden iPhone features? Put them in the interface where people can see them.
Good design isn’t about expensive overhauls or fancy aesthetics. It’s about clear communication and respect for the user’s mental energy.
As someone who works as a UX consultant helping businesses improve their digital products, I see these same principles playing out every day in websites and apps. A confusing checkout process is just a digital version of those unmarked shower dials. A navigation menu that doesn’t match users’ mental models is the website equivalent of those scrambled light switches.
The goal is always the same: create experiences that just work. Interfaces where users can accomplish their goals without having to decode the designer’s intentions or play guessing games with the controls.
The Gift of Seeing
So yes, Don Norman ruined my life in the sense that I can never again blissfully ignore bad design. Hotel showers will forever be a source of mild irritation. I’ll always notice when light switches don’t make sense.
But he also gave me a gift: the ability to appreciate good design when I see it, and the knowledge to create better experiences for others. Every time someone uses a product I’ve helped improve and doesn’t have to think about how it works, that’s Norman’s principles in action.
Because at the end of the day, that’s what good design is really about — making people’s lives a little bit easier, one well-designed interface at a time. Even if it means I’ll never be able to use a hotel shower in peace again.
