The Design of Everyday Things

The book, Design of Everyday Things, tells how a designer thinks about common place things to make them easier to use or more efficient. For example, how do you know if a door is a push or pull, or even where to push or pull? The author covers simple things, such as placement of the handle or bar to indicate which. The author later goes on to discuss how many times a bad design is really to blame in place of user error (which is officially the cause). The author argues that a good designer needs to get design the interface so that it will be easy and simple for the user.

This book is interesting in that it explores in great detail something that almost everybody takes for granted. I think this is useful for CHI because it makes you think how to make your user interfaces simpler. For example, put pictures by your buttons to make it more intuitive or change the layout so that there is less stuff per page to not intimidate the user as much. However, I think this book was much more verbose then necessary in describing the various examples and points.