Living with Complexity by Donald A. Norman

Living with Complexity Reviews

• 
  Mike

  Living with Complexity is an unfocused, incoherent, and redundant mess. The thesis statement presented by Bud Peterson in the foreword - what he thinks this book is about - is only applicable to the first few chapters and the last two. The rest seem like an old crank's ramshackle observations borne from a designer's penchant for exacting fussiness. Occasionally the examples are spot-on: unsightly wires connecting to a poorly-located outlet in the center of a conference room, and other times they are downright wrong. Norman praises the open layout of a bank for its so-called customer focus, even though it blatantly ignores bank customers' preference for privacy, a discomfort with overheard conversation about ones' personal finances, and lastly, this design is meant for people who are able to stand and is therefore discriminatory toward the wheelchair-bound. No wonder the other banks condemned this layout. Norman thinks the banks are wrong, though to avoid a lawsuit for shitty and unfair layout, and there are many moments like this where Norman simply refuses to think things through.
  
  Another is his total confusion as to why certain social signifiers in dinner etiquette - where to put what silverware and how to drape one's napkin - are so mystifying. He chalks it up to some sort of happenstance lack of public awareness, and completely misses the OBVIOUS point that these protocols are purposefully obscured so as to signal whether or not a person has social status or class. Certain signals given between people are meant to draw those socio-economic boundaries or, if not that, then a very narrow in-group/out-group dynamic. This is the low-hanging fruit of social psychology, and Norman doesn't even acknowledge it. It's a glaring omission in his chapter on social signifiers.
  
  Norman fails to get the joke when an engineer says, "If only we didn't have all these people around, our machines would work just fine" (114). Clearly a wry remark, a brief aside oozing with dry wit, yet Norman sees this as a sincere remark, a harbinger of tone-deaf design that is causing the encroaching apocalypse at the hands of callous misanthropes. He takes an inside joke in a program as a condescending threat in the same chapter. And while he's condemning patient care and a hospital's knack for measurable qualities over human qualities, he fails to analyze this problem or really chronicle what his perfectly-designed hospital would look like. He fails to acknowledge why his rudimentary examples (the Apple iPod, a TurboTax that lets you skip sections at will) are great examples: they are, by nature, not complex. The overwhelming amount of necessary measurements on top of immeasurable qualities in patient care without a doubt create a severely complex system. This much Norman acknowledges, but he is not audacious enough to outline a hospital that may be designed in the manner he adulates. I wonder if it's because he knows it's not enough, or that maybe in his narrow scope of vision of door signs and campus lawns he doesn't have the answer. Nor that does he acknowledge that people are trying to make health care simpler (see: Phreesia).
  
  And boy does Norman jump the ship on explaining things that merit explanation. After this quote: "The 'sameness' hypothesis is only sustainable if one ignores the internal meanings that people assign to cultural innovations." (196) There are no examples after; the section simply ends at this. The section about how design could or could not address if not shift firmly-rooted cultural practice is about six pages long and ends with little explained. This is a pattern in Living with Complexity: Norman presents mind-numbingly simple examples about a problem (e.g., the Disneyland "fast pass" when it comes to waiting in line) and then lines his credo with obvious statements (e.g. design ought to be human-oriented, simple things can be made complicated, it's important that people perceive fairness in how they are treated). But once he has the opportunity to analyze those simple things into complicated things, he abbreviates the discussion or sidesteps it altogether. A brilliant page about Ockham's Razor is cut short after the whole tenet is tossed aside. His discussion of cognitive dissonance is, at my most generous, a sloppy introduction (210). He goes on to praise the virtue of checklists, but doesn't address why checklists aren't the be-all/end-all of problem-solving. This is a critique that has existed since Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents decades prior, not to mention how checklists can easily turn into fantasy documents, or how health and safety inspectors are liable to become so primed by checklists that they may succumb to a sort of habit-formed myopia and fail to see nuanced findings in their inspections. He doesn't address another low-hanging fruit - moral hazard - in these situations at all. Why does Norman choose to make some topics more complex, but not others? There's not much of an answer beyond that this was clearly a hastily-written rehash job.
  
  Norman's book also suffers from the same platitudes as Tim Brown's Change by Design does: so-called home runs like "In many cases, the best way to simplify a task is to reconceptualize it" sort of sound promising but still beckon for more meaning (231). That is, when his book doesn't outright contradict itself. On 255, he writes that oftentimes salespeople are too biased to sell a well-designed product: "they couldn't get the salespeople to sell the phones. They weren't cool." Norman answers this question earlier in the book: not only are people bad judges of what they want, but things are more sellable to people generally if they possess features. So even if a design crew creates a Norman-approved phone to address peoples' needs, it might pain Norman to know that a phone created by the Creed of Norman doesn't abide something he already knows about the same people: "Features win over simplicity, even when people realize that features mean more complexity" (55). So which is it, Norman? Is it the bias of the sales force that deters consumers from buying a simple product? Or is it what you said previously in your book? Or is it that humans are contradictory and will give primed responses that don't necessarily reflect their needs based on the context in which the question or the need is presented? How did this pass an edit?
  
  Outside of these glaring issues in continuity, Living with Complexity is a collection of statements of the obvious about the mundane. Toilet paper, wires, doors, you name it. This may very well ruin my ability to read a much better book, The Design of Everyday Things. What a purposeless chore of a book.
• 
  Bill

  Another interesting book from Norman. Someone first gave me
  The Design of Everyday Things in grad school and I still hear its echoes almost every day in conversations about design. This book is not as groundbreaking as that earlier one, but I still found it valuable. The thesis of the book is quite simple: despite calls for "simplicity" we all actually want complex tools to deal with the complex world, so long as they are designed with care and empathy so that they can be mastered with appropriate time and effort. He gives interesting examples for each principle, and unlike in previous books spends time away from the world of products and screens on "service design" which was new to me and very relatable. His style is dry but humorous. I can tell Normal would be a very entertaining lecturer. If you've grown accustomed to the dumbed-down prose of bullet-list business books for the busy CEO, you might not immediately like Norman's style, but for the same reason I really appreciated it.
• 
  Katrusya

  От насправді очікувала трохи більшого. Класна тема, приємне видання, відомий автор, актуальна мені тема, але от насправді мабуть саме тому очікувала більшого)
  
  Виписала з неї кілька хороших ідей, важливих слів і зауважень, цікавих кейсів, але час від часу траплялися сторінки, які перегортала. Її можна було зробити динамічнішою, коротшою, живішою. Але маємо бути вдячні за те, що є)
• 
  Emma Sea

  I was hoping for something a little more about complex systems, in terms of how design and human factors interact. While there were a few examples in this vein, the book as a whole felt like a rewrite of
  The Design of Everyday Things.
  
  I do love Norman's writing style though; it's very pared back and sparse. There are just enough words to communicate what he wants to say, and nothing extra.
  
  There was one awesome tiny thing that I loved: I had no clue there were places in the world where a salt shaker has many holes, and the pepper shaker has one hole. It's like being told the sky is pink!
• 
  Brynn

  "Alfred North Whitehead: 'The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, Seek simplicity and distrust it.'"
  
  "But when that complexity is random and arbitrary, then we have reason to be annoyed."
  
  "...complexity by itself is neither good nor bad: it is confusion that is bad."
  
  "...things we understand are no longer complicated, no longer confusing."
  
  "Difficulties arise when there are conflicts between the principles, demands, and operation of technology with the tasks that we are accustomed to doing and with the habits and styles of human behavior and social interaction in general."
  
  "Rituals invariably add complexity to our lives, but in turn, they provide meaning and a sense of membership in a culture."
  
  "A conceptual model is the underlying belief structure held by a person about how something works."
  
  "Decreasing the number of buttons and displays is not the solution. The solution is to understand the total system, to design it in a way that allows all the pieces to fit nicely together, so that initial learning as well as usage are both optimal."
  
  "Tesler described it as a tradeoff: making things easier for the user means making it more difficult for the designer or engineer."
  
  "Simplicity is a mental state, highly coupled with understanding. Something is perceived as simple when its actions, options, and appearance match the person's conceptual model."
  
  "Simplicity decreases when the design makes it difficult to know what is happening or when controls have multiple meanings depending on context."
  
  "People prefer an intermediate level of complexity. Moreover, that preferred level varies with knowledge and experience. Complex things can be easy to use; simple things can be complicated. Sometimes we prefer the complex, sometimes the simple. Taming technology is a psychological task, not a physical one."
  
  "This is a forcing function: the correct behavior is the only possibility."
  
  "Understanding is what transforms complex systems into simple ones. Group understanding is often more powerful and robust than individual understanding."
  
  "Feedback and conceptual models are most important at two times during usage. One is when the product or service is first experienced, for now these aid in learning what to do and what to expect. The other is when there are problems or unexpected delays."
  
  "When it comes to people, not everything we believe to be important can yet be measured. On the other hand, much that we know is unimportant is easy to measure."
  
  "In the rush for efficiency through measurement, we should not forget the wisdom of Albert Einstein, the physicist, who is reported to have said 'not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.'"
  
  "We now recognize that one critical component of good design is good interaction, and interaction, to a large extent, is about proper communication."
  
  
• 
  박은정 Park

  처음 몇 장을 읽을 때는 '과학적 관리' 과목의 대중화 version일거라고 생각했으나, 실제로는 그 보다 훨씬 많은 의미와 철학들을 담고 있다는 사실을 알게 되었다. '복잡함을 다스리는 기술'에 대해 여러모로 생각해볼 수 있게 되어서 아주 마음에 들었던 책. (무엇보다 현재 진행하고 있는 TV 프로젝트에 많은 영감이!)
  
  Excerpts
  * 단순함과 복잡함의 차이는 구조에 있다.
  * 애플의 부사장이 된 래리 테슬러(Larry Tesler)는 몇 년 전 "시스템의 전체적인 복잡도는 항상 동일하다"고 주장했다. (중략)
  테슬러는 2007년 인터렉션 디자인의 권위자인 댄 새퍼(Dan Saffer)와의 인터뷰에서 다음과 같이 말했다.
  "모든 프로그램에는 더 이상 줄일 수 없는 복잡한 정도, 즉 복잡함의 하한선이 존재한다. 이때 던져야 할 질문은 이 복잡함을 누가 감당하느냐는 것이다. 사용자인가, 아니면 개발자인가?"
  * 조경사나 도시 계획가들은 그들이 설계한 길이 무참히 파괴되는 것을 달가워하지 않는다. 누군가는 자신이 신중히 설계한 계획을 생각없고 게으른 사람이 짓밟는다며 분노한다. 이는 이상적인 길을 반영한다는 의미에서 '희망선(desire lines, 비공식적 보행자도로)'이라고 불린다. 현명한 도시 계획가라면 이 희망선에 깔린 메시지에 귀 기울여야 한다. 희망선이 디자이너의 아름다운 계획을 파괴한다는 것은 그 디자인이 사람들의 욕망을 반영하지 않는다는 신호다. - p.151
  * 우리는 전체 사건에서 어떤 부분을 가장 잘 기��하는가? 이는 많은 심리학자들이 연구에 착수한 질문이다. 독특한 경험은 언제나 도드라지게 기억된다. 하지만 모든 것이 들어하는 기다렸다가 떠나는 것과 같이 비교적 일정하다면 기억에 가장 큰 영향을 미치는 순서는 끝, 시작, 중간이다. 이를 '서열 위치 효과(serial position effect)'라고 한다. 오랫동안 불쾌한 사건이 일어나더라도 사건의 마무리 시간, 즉 끝 부분에 덜 불쾌한(그렇지만 여전히 불쾌한) 일이 일어나면 그 사건은 긍정적으로 인지된다는 결론을 발표한 연구도 있다. 서열 위치 효과는 지극히 반직관적이다. 왜냐하면 아주 잠깐 수준이 조금 낮은 불쾌감이 들어갔다는 점만 빼면 이 사건 자체가 긴 불쾌감이기 때문이다. 하지만 기억을 지배하는 것은 마지막이다. 이 실험의 핵심은 명확하다. 마지막을 긍정적으로 장식하라.
  (중략)
  여행이 시작되기 전에는 행복한 기대감으로 가득했다. 돌아와서는 그 일들을 즐겁게 기억했다. 하지만 여행 중에는 현실은 기대와 다르고 안 좋은 일도 많이 생겼다고 했다. 그래도 기억에서 힘들었던 부분은 사라지고 좋은 부분만 남았다. 어쩌면 더 강화되거나 실제보다 더 멋지게 포장됐는지도 모른다. 이처럼 기억은 실제로 일어난 일보다 훨씬 더 중요하다. 이것은 디자인의 주제이기도 하다. - p.248
• 
  Lala Lena

  Що ж, отак от, придбати книгу на конференції два роки тому і підписати, власне, у автора 🦭 ... а прочитати тільки зараз, але краще пізно, аніж ніколи. Цікава, пізнавальна добірка історій, що будуть корисними не тільки дизайнерам, інженерам, але й урбаністам і просто всім людям, що цікавляться дизайном, як невід'ємною складовою життя. Адже складність, це не є заплутаність, приборкування цієї складності то нагода отримувати новий досвід ну і хіба цікаво було б нам без складностей 🙃
• 
  Nathan Shelton

  At times, this book was a fun read; however, the chapters were too long and repetitive to allow for a higher rating.
  
  In short, 280 pages later, designers and users must cooperate with each other to ensure that the technology we use is complex enough to match the richness of the world we live in; however, also appropriately simple.
• 
  Paulo Ribeiro

  This book was a pleasure to read as it presents high-level design principles in a very accessible language, illustrated with memorable examples. I found it very easy to extrapolate these design principles to my Technical Writing field.
• 
  Rich Kelley

  I recall reading Norman's The Psychology of Everyday Things back in the late 1980s and enjoying it immensely. That was his first book and it was groundbreaking. I haven't read any of the books he's published since--and he's written a lot. This was this month's selection for my UX Book Club in NYC and I found it much lighter than the other books we've read--and I had the distinct sense that much of the material was recycled. It didn't strike me as a stunning revelation that the world is complex, that complexity is not a bad thing, and that designers must find the appropriate conceptual model to make a product or system as simple to use as possible. What I want to know is how do we find that conceptual model. This book doesn't tell you that. I liked how he differentiates between affordances and signifiers--but he spends only a few pages on that here. My fellow UX discussants says he spends more time on that in his other books, specifically The Design of Everyday Things. So perhaps I read the wrong book.
• 
  Lydia

  I liked Norman's "Life of Everyday Things" better, maybe only because it was the first time I was thinking about how design affects our life. Norman goes further here, looking at how to make your wait in a line better or why hospital care is now focused on how you appear through your computerized records rather than your human-ness. He points out that things are more complex now, than they were even a few years ago, but it seems a bit too random with few solutions. I don't feel any better about it. I want to hear about solutions, elegance found. Norman sounds like he is only readying for the onslaught of baby number seven billion.
• 
  Seema

  بلغة سهلة يشرح هذا الكتاب ببساطة كيف تتعقد الأمور البسيطة.
  لا أرى الكتاب يصلح للتسلية برغم المعلومات المثيرة التي فيه. ولا يصلح بأن يقرأ بنصف عين, لأنه يحتاج بعض التركيز.
  
  أستفادتي منه كبيرة منها أن النظام لا يعني الترتيب. والفرق بين الـ complex والـ complicated. فالأولى هي حالة الشيء ولا عيب في ذلك, والأخرى هي الحالة الذهنية لنا عن شيءٍ ما. والتعرف على تفكير المصمم أثناء عمل أي منتج.
  
  التعقيد لا يكون مخيفًا, إلا حين لا نفهمه.
• 
  Initially NO

  A philosophical discussion of why what might seem to simplify, actually complicates. The hole codes on salt and pepper shakers being up to the discretion and custom of those who use them; how Disney Land purposely keeps people waiting as long as they can at rides, so they don't have to build more, and instead offers street entertainment so people don't think too much about waiting...
  A very pared-down accessible book, that is interesting enough.
• 
  Yuree

  This book reminds me of one of the professor from my grad school. I still remember his pathetic look when I mentioned the same opinion the author want to talk about nature of design (it was almost 6 years ago now). He is one of well known groupie of the author of this book in Korea and now I am truly curious what he will think after reading this.
• 
  Karen

  Was drawn in by the cover design and concept. The entire book is printed in sans serif type. Is that supposed to be indicative of less complexity?
  Read on a design site that when something is printed in a font that's hard to read, greater understanding is the result due to forcing the reader to decipher the content.
  
  It's also annoying.
• 
  Nathanael Coyne

  You could very easily read this instead of DOET/POET, or if you've read his early work then there's not much new in here. The concept of complex vs complicated could be summed up in just one chapter, not spread over a whole book. Nonetheless, it's still a book you should read.
• 
  Jack Vinson

  I decided to blog a review of this one after all. Good stuff.
  
  http://blog.jackvinson.com/archives/2...
  
  Reading for the Boston area UX Book Club meeting on 6 Jan 2011.
  http://www.meetup.com/uxboston/calend...
  
• 
  Dale

  If Donald Norman had written nothing else prior to this book I would probably rate it higher. But by comparison to his earlier books, this one seems disjointed, discursive, and dull. If you're interested in design, I would recommend his 'Design of Everyday Things' and 'Design of Future Things'.
• 
  Pasquale

  The best book for understanding the interaction design !
  
• 
  Brandon Carlson

  Not bad. Had some good parts and some bad parts. It was interesting when the author was discussing queueing theory and it's relationship to design.
• 
  Soren_Schneider

  Це друга книга Дона Нормана, яку я прочитав. І не остання.
  
  Загалом ця книга про те, що не варто сприймати складність як проблему. Реальна проблема - ускладнювання. Між цими термінами є велика прірва. Яка саме і в чому це проявляється? Відповідь у книзі.
  
  Головною думкою на самому початку і в кінці є твердження, що робота дизайнера (будь-чого) - знайти медіум між простотою та складністю. Бо обидві крайнощі приведуть нас до продукту, який не буде нікому цікавий. Разом з тим треба зробити продукт достатньо зрозумілим, щоб його хотілося придбати. Тобто, у цій книзі Дональд Норман пояснює читачеві концепцію User Experience. У той час, як попередня праця "Емоційний дизайн: Чому ми любимо (або ненавидимо) речі довкола нас" пояснює нам концепцію User Interface. Тому ці книги варто читати одна за одною. Принаймні я так і зробив.
  
  Вже маючи досвід читання книжок Дона Нормана можу сказати, що іноді його складно читати. Що є іронічним. Деінде автор дозволяє собі робити рандомні приклади з великим ланцюгом однієї думки, яку він розкриває у той момент, коли ти забув з чого взагалі він почав розмову. Останні дві глави було важко читати через дуже вже заморочений текст, який ти читаєш просто щоб закінчити книгу. Тобто ти розумієш про що мова, але така вже вимучена кінцівка, на відміну від жвавого початку, де він дозволяв собі робити іронічні коментарі у бік поганого дизайну речей. Забагато повторень. Можливо це суто особисте враження і комусь це не здаватиметься проблемою. Але саме через це я зняв один бал.
  
  У висновку можу сказати, що обидві книжки мастгев для тих, хто цікавиться дизайном або хоче стати дизайнером. Видавництво ArtHuss дуже добре попрацювали з текстами Нормана і зробили гарне видання. Тому раджу прочитати.
• 
  Molly

  Having never read a book on design before, this was an interesting-enough foray into the field. Norman discusses how our world is inherently complex, so the design of objects and technology has to take that into account while still providing coherent conceptual models of how a thing should be used. I thought certain ideas were more intriguing than others: the chapter on designing waits was probably the most enlightening, with some of the material about social signifiers and the design of systems being just about as interesting.
  
  However, the book didn't have a lot of "oomph". I didn't find anything Norman was saying to be truly groundbreaking. Perhaps that wasn't the point of the book: Norman isn't presenting his own research (very much) or trying to argue a big thesis; he's really trying more to summarize several ideas in the field of design into an overarching set of guidelines for designers of complex products.
  
  Ultimately, Living with Complexity was a slightly deeper dive into the considerations behind products I use every day. I am coming away from this book with a lot of "huh, that's sort of interesting" feelings, and I might find a few of the ideas within applicable in my career, but my life was ultimately not changed by this book .
• 
  Francis Norton

  I'm reading Don Norman's Living with Complexity for a UX Book Club London meetup, but I am also trying to prepare for the Service Design short course at Central St Martins that I will be taking next month, so I'm going to focus on his comments on Service Design - especially since this is the first Don Norman book I've read where he discusses this topic.
  
  In many ways the book is something old, something new. The old bit - and none the less true for it - is his job description for designers:
  

  The designer's job is to provide people with appropriate mental models.

  
  [ch 2, p29]
  The official new element is the complexity of the title, and his view that many devices and services involve an irreducible complexity which cannot be magicked away, as he expresses in a quote:
  

  Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is who will have to deal with it, the user or the developer (programmer or engineer). (Tesler and Saffer 2007)

  
  [ch 2, p46]
  
  Chapter 6, Systems and Services, and chapter 7, Waits, are the most directly relevant to service design. He discusses the relative immaturity of Service Design compare to Product Design in characteristically IxD terms:
  
  

  The world of services is different from that of products, in part because they have not been studied as much as products. Although one would think that service providers should also adhere to the standard themes of good interaction design, that is, good feedback along with coherent conceptual models, in practice it is not that simple. Services are often complex systems, barely understood even by the service provider, with multiple components spread across many geographical locations and divisions of the company.

  
  [ch 6, p144]
  Don Norman has respect for the challenge: services are described in terms of complexity, back-stage and front-stage, recursiveness (a customer's back-stage may be a clerk's front-stage) and the systems thinking required.
  
  Amongst other case studies, he describes IDEO's re-design of Amtrak's Acela Express: how IDEO declined an RFP for redesigning train interiors in favour of redesigning the entire service, starting with "learning about routes, timetables, costs" through 10 stages to "Continuing the journey" (how true - I would use UK long distance train services far more if I could hire a car at my destination as simply as I can at an airport), and Apple's iPod and iTunes, both illustrating roads to commercial success that involve thinking of the offering as a system and its delivery as an extended service.
  
  I found an equally coherent but somewhat contrasting perspective in Journey to the Interface, a pamphlet published back in 2006 by Demos and Engine Service Design.
  
  They take a more humanist approach:
  

  Service designers do not see service as something that can be reduced to a commodity. They focus on how people actually experience services, in order to understand how large service organisations can create better relationships with their users and customers.

  
  
  Experiences and relationships are the recurring themes of this pamphlet.
  This model is not necessarily incompatible with the Don's - early on we get a little BUPA case study, which ends:
  

  A tangible change that has emerged from doing this exercise regularly is that customers calling to discuss their hospital visit are now offered a checklist of things that other people in similar situations have asked. This was introduced after BUPA realised that people often didn’t know what to ask when the call finished with the question ‘is there anything else I can help you with?’ Alison, again: "You have to do as much as possible to manage getting into people’s shoes – psychologically, emotionally, physically"

  
  Although the terminology is different, this example fits right in Don Norman's emphasis on ensuring that the user develops a mental model which includes understanding the most relevant future options.
  
  Two things that distinguish the Demos / Engine Service Design approach from Don Norman's are,
  [1] the emphasis on relationships, eg
  The picture of service is no less complex from the interface as it is from a systemic perspective. What is different, however, is that the interface focuses on how people and services relate, not simply the shape of existing services.
  and [2], the emphasis on co-production, eg:
  Service designers focus on a specific kind of engagement:
  engagement at the interface. Deliberation has to take place at the point of delivery to create the kind of engagement required for co-production – that where people are mobilised, coached, and
  encouraged to participate in the ‘common enterprise’ of generating positive outcomes.
  
  A point shared by both publications is the difficulty of measuring (and thus funding) the value of services which are designed to provide long-term or preventative outcomes - I would like to have seen some discussion of Social Impact Bonds here, as one apparently appropriate mechanism.
  
  All in all, I'd say Don Norman's book is an excellent overview of various design issues from an Interaction Design perspective. There was a common feeling at the UX Book Club London meeting I was at (IG Index - thanks Jane and Chris!) that it would be most appropriate to an interested non-designer, and in fact the Service Design chapter was found by many to be the most interesting, perhaps because we weren't, in the main, Service Designers.
  
  On Service Design specifically, I found it a helpful snapshot, if conservative in vision. The greater ambitions of Journey to the Interface are somewhat focussed on a specific British context, but I find it entirely plausible that changing the relationship between service users and service providers could have more radical effects than changing the relationship between consumers and their products or programs, especially when achieved by techniques like co-production.
• 
  Jody Barton

  One of Norman's least inconsistent books, has some interesting observations, still think he contradicts himself, and makes claims without evidence of any kind, including seemingly personal experience, many of which are claims to universality.
• 
  Gualtiero Dragotti

  piacevolissimo da leggere, è assai meno profondo di quel che sembra a prima vista. due o tre idee geniali, almeno per me che di mestiere non faccio il designer. per il resto tante osservazioni che sfiorano l'ovvio.
• 
  Maria Teresa

  A must read for interaction designers!
• 
  Glenn

  Much preferred ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ over this book. Would suggest just picking and choosing particular chapters if you’ve read the aforementioned.