User-centered design 101


In the 1980s, I was designing computer graphics tools that could do lots of things, but many of our customers sometimes found them difficult to use. In the parlance of the day, they were not “user-friendly” enough. Trying to improve the state of affairs, I started reading up on usability and stumbled across Don Norman’s work in user-centered design. It fundamentally changed the way I design. Norman got to the essence of what it means for people to successfully interact with software.


Donald Norman is a cognitive psychologist who has made contributions ranging from early artificial intelligence to cognitive science, but he is best known as the “father” of user-centered design. The slogan for the 1933 World’s Fair was "Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms." User-centered design turns that around and places the user as the center of attention. The design process becomes a dialogue between the designer and its users, using the product as its mediator.


Although the devil is always in the details, the usability of most products can be dramatically improved if the designer pays attention to just a five basic ideas:





Norman goes into much more detail and offers many examples to illustrate the basic ideas of designing things that people can easily use in his book, The Design of Everyday Things. It was published in 1990 and has become the bible of user-centered design. His writing style is fun and very readable. I used to assign the book to my students, but many would complain his examples were ancient. Norman he has recently updated it to reflect the fast pace of technology but the fundamentals of usability have not changed. If you can design your product with just these five larger ideas in mind, the smaller steps tend to sort themselves out and your users will have an overall better experience interacting with your work.


About Bill Ferster

Bill Ferster is a research professor at the University of Virginia and a technology consultant for organizations using web-applications for ed-tech, data visualization, and digital media. For more information, see www.stagetools.com/consult.