The Design of Everyday Things
Don Norman's foundational text on human-centered design and why everyday objects frustrate us.
This is the book that taught me to blame designers instead of blaming myself when I can’t figure out how a door opens.
Norman walks through everyday frustrations—doors that push when they should pull, stove knobs that don’t map to burners, faucets that require engineering degrees—and systematically explains why these failures happen and how to fix them through affordances, signifiers, and feedback.
The concept of “Norman doors” stuck with me most: doors with handles that suggest pulling when they only push, creating hundreds of tiny failures every day in buildings around the world.
It directly connects to how I think about building interfaces and tools—every confusion point is a design failure, not a user failure, and that shift in responsibility changes everything.
Reading it felt like getting a new vocabulary for complaints I’d had my whole life but couldn’t articulate, combined with a framework for actually fixing those problems.
Since finishing it, I catch myself mentally redesigning every confusing interface I encounter, and I’ve become insufferable about pointing out Norman doors to friends.