Don Norman's Design of Everday Things

ben

brad

brian

Don Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things was a moderately interesting read about how designs for things we interact with are difficult to use sometimes unless designed properly. He talked about how sometimes functions for a device are so hard to find it would be hard for a rocket scientist to figure out how to use. And he stressed that the designers of these devices that are difficult to use is the consequence of bad design and not user error. So if a door has a horizontal bar on it and it looks like you should push it but you actually have to pull it then your like "WTF? this door is stupid." Overall he had some very interesting things to say about design and user interfaces.
The faults in this book, though, lie with his constant barrage of examples that bore you to death. 1 or 2 examples for each idea would have been fine but he gives about 10. This work should be applied more to computers as well I think most of his examples were just for common every items, but it would be interesting to see it done for computers and software.

After reading the book I took a look at this Pentax camera and some of its functions and uses are pretty obscure. For one, to open the back of it and put film in you have to pull the circle on the left of the camera up until the back pops. There are no markings or indications for this, you just have to know. Also none of the knobs or numbers on it are labeled you just have to be able to recognize what the numbers stand for. Basically you have to be a professional camera person or have read the manual (if it even comes with one) to understand how to work it.