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What our customer's say!

"A Must Read for every Designer", As a human being we think we know other people and how they see and use products. This book tells many amusing anecdotes about products that were not successful because the designer made the things is a way he would have liked and not in the way real users use it. The book is written full of humor and with real passion for the subject.

"Outdated, better books available", This book is a classic in the sense that it was once groundbreaking, in that it pointed out obvious flaws in industrial and software design. However, a lack of any updates outside of a new introduction leaves the book stale and dated. Complaints about the design of 1980s DOS software and VCRs is now of only historical interest.

"One of the best books any designer could read", So often "design" books seem to go on about looks and "feel" yet only brush over the physiology of design. This book shows you how to think like a user, explorer like a user, error like a user and design for helping the user love your product.

Anyone reading this book will instantly appreciate truly good design over the average mud we currently live in.

"It's OK - but how can this be the seminal book on usability...?", Having heard that this was the seminal work in usabiliy, my expectations were probably too high.

Some of the principles laid out are indeed excellent and well illustrated.

The structure of the book is - ironically - not crystal clear. As I am reading the book I find myself looking back at the table of contents to understand the structure.

The writing style is slightly entertaining at first and you sympathize with the author hanging out himself as a clumsy and spacey academic. However, after the first 30 pages the rambling style and the somewhat unstructured content makes the book really boring. I had to push myself to finish it.

What strikes me is the lack of other books in this topic. Despite my criticism I'd be curious to read Norman's new book.

"Vey fast delivery very prompt service", very nice delivery very fast response. One of the best sellers at amazon.
will do business any time with them.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Review", Very good, but very outdated at the end when computers were discussed. Sounds like it was written pre-windows i.e. late '80s.



"The Years Have Not Been Kind", I take it from other people's reviews that this book is considered by stome to be a classic in the design field. However, I found it unreadable and gave up after a little over a hundred pages. The book failed me on a number of levels, which is particularly surprising considering that the subject of the book is designing things that conveiently and elegantly meet the needs of the user.

Although I was a young adult when the book was first published in the late 1980's, the examples in the book (telphones, sewing machines, typewriters, film projectors, etc.) are so dated, the typesetting so badly done and the pictures of such poor quality, that I felt at times that I was looking at a book from the Eisenhower administration.

His points about good design are valid but are obvious and well known(in his defense, perhaps when he wrote the book they were novel). Devices like single serve coffee machines, ipods and blackberries have brought good design principles into the general consciousness.

He also spends very little time providing interesting examples of good and bad designs and how they came about and their consequences and instead spends too much time rambling. There's an Andy Rooney-ish quality to his musings that was usually annoying but occasionally quaint (his musings that in a decade there would be a good pocket sized computer device that would track his meetings and other information had me checking the book's copyright date). His grumpy complaints about having to remember phone numbers, phone card codes, zip codes and the codes for those new fangled ATM machines brought to my mind images of Homer Simpson's dad, not a man with cutting edge ideas on design.

By the time I gave up halfway through the book, I wasn't sure why the book had been written. Norman seems particularly obsessed with door handles and I just couldn't share his passion on the subject. I would have been more interested in important examples of design failure (e.g., if memory serves, the Audi 100 series' placement of the brake and accelerator pedals that resulted in "sudden acceleration" problems at the time he wrote this book) rather than an obsession with the layout of knobs and burners on stove tops.

I threw my copy in the trash.



"Industrial design in a nutshell", Dome-headed engineering professors call it "human factors engineering," "interaction design" or "usability engineering," but the purpose of this strangely-named discipline is far simpler than these appellations suggest: to make everyday items do what users expect them to do. Donald Norman has been thinking about usability issues longer than almost anyone and has insights commensurate with his experience. Norman knows how both people and machines work (he has degrees in psychology and engineering). More importantly, he knows how to bridge the gulf between the human mind and the devices the mind wants to use, from toasters to telephones to teapots. In this classic, he provides a few simple precepts and many wonderful examples showing how to design the most important component of any technology - the user's experience. While some of Norman's examples are a little long in the tooth (he discusses VCRs, not DVDs), we find that the principles he describes in this friendly book are still sprightly almost 20 years after their initial publication.

"Still a classic", Have you ever stood in front of a door, or a microwave, absolutely flummoxed, because the damned thing gave you no clue whatsoever how to open it. If so (even if not), you will enjoy this book. In clear, coruscating prose he exposes the miserable flaws in the design of everyday objects which conspire to make our lives less convenient, more miserable, and sometimes more dangerous.

The book is not just an exposé of the appalling laziness and hostility to consumers that is commonplace among designers( e.g. in the software industry, which is a story unto itself - see "The Lunatics are Running the Asylum") - it is also a clarion call to action. We need not live in a world where it appears that appliances conspire to make us feel like idiots. And when they do - when you can't figure out which button to push, or whether a door opens inward or outward - remember that you are not the one at fault. It is the lazy incompetent designer of the thing which is making you miserable who is deserving of scorn and ridicule.

Far too often, in a design world which favors form over function and usability, crimes against the user get rewarded with prizes and the acclaim of the design cognoscenti. People who presumably never have to struggle with the consequences of their own reckless disregard for the usability of the objects they design.

This book is an outraged and eloquent call for change. Though it was written several years ago, the central arguments hold up well, and the style is humorous and engaging.

"A little technical but very informative", If every manufacturer followed his rules we would all be happier and in some instances safer. Interesting read