Full Blog Design of Everyday Things

Summary
The Design of Everyday Things gave an interesting portrayal of how the thought process works in creating interfaces and various objects and the pitfalls that occur when doing this. Throughout most of the chapters the author continually speaks about the minor problems that plague well known devices. These include the phone or temperature setting devices. Odd labeling, multiple switches, and information overload were just some of the examples that the author gave to why users are confused or just make mistakes. By pointing out these flaws the author was trying to give designers a way to see that thinking about the design through their own eyes is not always the best policy. The user usually will need to be catered to when it comes to these interfaces by giving the obvious functions in an obvious way and not making things complicated. This was the theme throughout the entire book.

Discussion
This book was actually my least favorite at the beginning of the course. The author simply pointed out the flaws of all these simple objects and went on and on about them. I could not see what he was doing by just mentioning these already obvious flaws. However, I grew to see that showing these simple examples show the underlaying cause of why these flaws come up in the first place. By the end the author was walking through the steps that designers should take heed of in order to not fall into these bad habits so the designer wont make obvious nor non-obvious mistakes.