The Design of Everyday Things (52 page)

Finally, my colleagues at the Institute for Cognitive Science at UCSD helped throughout—in part through the wizardry of international computer mail, in part through their personal assistance to the details of the process. I single out Bill Gaver, Mike Mozer, and Dave Owen for their detailed comments, but many helped out at one time or another during the research that preceded the book and the several years of writing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR
DESIGN OF EVERYDAY THINGS
, REVISED EDITION

Because this new edition follows the organization and principles of the first, all the help given to me for that earlier edition applies to this one as well.

I have learned a lot in the years that have passed since the first edition of this book. For one thing, then I was an academic scholar. In the interim I have worked in several different companies. The most important experience was at Apple, where I began to appreciate how issues—budget, schedule, competitive forces, and the
established base of products—that seldom concern scientists can dominate decisions in the world of business. While I was at Apple it had lost its way, but nothing is a better learning experience than a company in trouble: you have to be a fast learner.

I learned about schedules and budgets, about the competing demand of the different divisions, about the role of marketing, industrial design, and graphical, usability, and interactive design (today lumped together under the rubric of experience design). I visited numerous companies across the United States, Europe, and Asia and talked with numerous partners and customers. It was a great learning experience. I am indebted to Dave Nagel, who hired and then promoted me to vice president of advanced technology, and to John Scully, the first CEO I worked with at Apple: John had the correct vision of the future. I learned from many people, far too many to name (a quick review of the Apple people I worked closely with and who are still in my contact list reveals 240 names).

I learned about industrial design first from Bob Brunner, then from Jonathan (Joni) Ive. (Joni and I had to fight together to convince Apple management to produce his ideas. My, how Apple has changed!) Joy Mountford ran the design team in advanced technology and Paulien Strijland ran the usability testing group in the product division. Tom Erickson, Harry Saddler, and Austin Henderson worked for me in the User Experience Architect's office. Of particular significance to my increased understanding were Larry Tesler, Ike Nassi, Doug Solomon, Michael Mace, Rick LaFaivre, Guerrino De Luca, and Hugh Dubberly. Of special importance were the Apple Fellows Alan Kay, Guy Kawasaki, and Gary Starkweather. (I was originally hired as an Apple Fellow. All Fellows reported to the VP of advanced technology.) Steve Wozniak, by a peculiar quirk, was an Apple employee with me as his boss, which allowed me to spend a delightful afternoon with him. I apologize to those of you who were so helpful, but who I have not included here.

I thank my wife and critical reader, Julie Norman, for her patience in repeated careful readings of the manuscripts, telling me
when I was stupid, redundant, and overly wordy. Eric Norman showed up as a young child in two of the photos of the first edition, and now, twenty-five years later, read the entire manuscript and provided cogent, valuable critiques. My assistant, Mimi Gardner, held off the e-mail onslaught, allowing me to concentrate upon writing, and of course my friends at the Nielsen Norman group provided inspiration. Thank you, Jakob.

Danny Bobrow of the Palo Alto Research Center, a frequent collaborator and coauthor of science papers for four decades, has provided continual advice and cogent critiques of my ideas. Lera Boroditsky shared her research on space and time with me, and further delighted me by leaving Stanford to take a job at the department I had founded, Cognitive Science, at UCSD.

I am of course indebted to Professor Yutaka Sayeki of the University of Tokyo for permission to use his story of how he managed the turn signals on his motorcycle. I used the story in the first edition, but disguised the name. A diligent Japanese reader figured out who it must have been, so for this edition, I asked Sayeki for permission to name him.

Professor Kun-Pyo Lee invited me to spend two months a year for three years at the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology (KAIST) in its Industrial Design department, which gave me a much deeper insight into the teaching of design, Korean technology, and the culture of Northeast Asia, plus many new friends and a permanent love for kimchi.

Alex Kotlov, watching over the entrance to the building on Market Street in San Francisco where I photographed the destination control elevators, not only allowed me to photograph them, but then turned out to have read DOET!

In the years since publication of POET/DOET, I have learned a considerable amount about the practice of design. At IDEO I am indebted to David Kelly and Tim Brown, as well as fellow IDEO Fellows Barry Katz and Kristian Simsarian. I've had many fruitful discussions with Ken Friedman, former dean of the faculty of design at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, as well as
with my colleagues at many of the major schools of design around the world, in the United States, London, Delft, Eindhoven, Ivrea, Milan, Copenhagen, and Hong Kong.

And thanks to Sandra Dijkstra, my literary agent for almost thirty years, with POET being one of her first books, but who now has a large team of people and successful authors. Thanks, Sandy.

Andrew Haskin and Kelly Fadem, at the time students at CCA, the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, did all of the drawings in the book—a vast improvement over the ones in the first edition that I did myself.

Janaki (Mythily) Kumar, a User Experience designer at SAP, provided valuable comments on real world practices.

Thomas Kelleher (TJ), my editor at Basic Books for this revised edition, provided rapid, efficient advice and editing suggestions (which led me to yet another massive revision of the manuscript that vastly improved the book). Doug Sery served as my editor at MIT Press for the UK edition of this book (as well as for
Living with Complexity
). For this book, TJ did all the work and Doug provided encouragement.

GENERAL READINGS AND NOTES

In the notes below, I first provide general readings. Then, chapter by chapter, I give the specific sources used or cited in the book.

In this world of rapid access to information, you can find information about the topics discussed here by yourself. Here is an example: In
Chapter 5
, I discuss root cause analysis as well as the Japanese method called the Five Whys. Although my descriptions of these concepts in
Chapter 5
are self-sufficient for most purposes, readers who wish to learn more can use their favorite search engine with the critical phrases in quotes.

Most of the relevant information can be found online. The problem is that the addresses (URLs) are ephemeral. Today's locations of valuable information may no longer be at the same place tomorrow. The creaky, untrustworthy Internet, which is all we have today, may finally, thank goodness, be replaced by a superior scheme. Whatever the reason, the Internet addresses I provide may no longer work. The good news is that over the years that will pass after the publication of this book, new and improved search methods will certainly arise. It should be even easier to find more information about any of the concepts discussed in this book.

These notes provide excellent starting points. I provide critical references for the concepts discussed in the book, organized by
the chapters where they were discussed. The citations serve two purposes. First, they provide credit to the originators of the ideas. Second, they serve as starting points to get a deeper understanding of the concepts. For more advanced information (as well as newer, further developments), go out and search. Enhanced search skills are important tools for success in the twenty-first century.

GENERAL READINGS

When the first edition of this book was published, the discipline of interaction design did not exist, the field of human-computer interaction was in its infancy, and most studies were done under the guise of “usability” or “user interface.” Several very different disciplines were struggling to bring clarity to this enterprise, but often with little or no interaction among the disciplines. The academic disciplines of computer science, psychology, human factors, and ergonomics all knew of one another's existence and often worked together, but design was not included. Why not design? Note that all the disciplines just listed are in the areas of science and engineering—in other words, technology. Design was then mostly taught in schools of art or architecture as a profession rather than as a research-based academic discipline. Designers had remarkably little contact with science and engineering. This meant that although many excellent practitioners were trained, there was essentially no theory: design was learned through apprenticeship, mentorship, and experience.

Few people in the academic disciplines were aware of the existence of design as a serious enterprise, and as a result, design, and in particular, graphical, communication, and industrial design worked completely independently of the newly emerging discipline of human-computer interaction and the existing disciplines of human factors and ergonomics. Some product design was taught in departments of mechanical engineering, but again, with little interaction with design. Design was simply not an academic discipline, so there was little or no mutual awareness or collaboration. Traces of this distinction remain today, although design is more and more becoming a research-based discipline, where professors
have experience in practice as well as PhDs. The boundaries are disappearing.

This peculiar history of many independent, disparate groups all working on similar issues makes it difficult to provide references that cover both the academic side of interaction and experience design, and the applied side of design. The proliferation of books, texts, and journals in human-computer interaction, experience design, and usability is huge: too large to cite. In the materials that follow, I provide a very restricted number of examples. When I originally put together a list of works I considered important, it was far too long. It fell prey to the problem described by Barry Schwartz in his book
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
(2005). So I decided to simplify by providing less. It is easy to find other works, including important ones that will be published after this book. Meanwhile, my apologies to my many friends whose important and useful works had to be trimmed from my list.

Industrial designer Bill Moggridge was extremely influential in establishing interaction within the design community. He played a major role in the design of the first portable computer. He was one of the three founders of IDEO, one of the world's most influential design firms. He wrote two books of interviews with key people in the early development of the discipline:
Designing Interactions
(2007) and
Designing Media
(2010). As is typical of discussions from the discipline of design, his works focus almost entirely upon the practice of design, with little attention to the science. Barry Katz, a design professor at San Francisco's California College of the Arts, Stanford's d.school, and an IDEO Fellow, provides an excellent history of design practice within the community of companies in Silicon Valley, California:
Ecosystem of Innovation: The History of Silicon Valley Design
(2014). An excellent, extremely comprehensive history of the field of product design is provided by Bernhard Bürdek's
Design: History, Theory, and Practice of Product Design
(2005). Bürdek's book, originally published in German but with an excellent English translation, is the most comprehensive history of product design I have been able to find. I highly recommend it to those who want to understand the historical foundations.

Modern designers like to characterize their work as providing deep insight into the fundamentals of problems, going far beyond the popular conception of design as making things pretty. Designers emphasize this aspect of their profession by discussing the special way in which they approach problems, a method they have characterized as “design thinking.” A good introduction to this comes from the book
Change by Design
(2009), by Tim Brown and Barry Katz. Brown is CEO of IDEO and Katz an IDEO Fellow (see the previous paragraph).

An excellent introduction to design research is provided in Jan Chipchase and Simon Steinhardt's
Hidden in Plain Sight
(2013). The book chronicles the life of a design researcher who studies people by observing them in their homes, barber shops, and living quarters around the world. Chipchase is executive creative director of global insights at Frog Design, working out of the Shanghai office. The work of Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt in
Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems
(1998) presents a powerful method of analyzing behavior; they have also produced a useful workbook (Holtzblatt, Wendell, & Wood, 2004).

There are many excellent books. Here are a few more:

Buxton, W. (2007).
Sketching user experience: Getting the design right and the right design
. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. (And see the companion workbook [Greenberg, Carpendale, Marquardt, & Buxton, 2012].)

Coates, D. (2003).
Watches tell more than time: Product design, information, and the quest for elegance
. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Cooper, A., Reimann, R., & Cronin, D. (2007).
About face 3: The essentials of interaction design
. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Pub.

Hassenzahl, M. (2010).
Experience design: Technology for all the right reasons
. San Rafael, California: Morgan & Claypool.