UX Mastery Book Club: A Chat with Don Norman

hello there I'm Luke Chambers and welcome to a special edition uh video for ux Mastery Book Club I'm humbled and excited to be joined today by Don Norman widely regarded for his expertise in the fields of design usability engineering um cognitive science uh for being a prolific advocate for human centered design uh for his gentle humor and for the inspiration and orientation he provides for designers with a rich and varied career and amongst his many other roles which make it difficult to do justice with only a short introduction Don is currently the director of The Design Lab at the University of California San Diego and co-founder and consultant with the neelson Norman group he's here to chat with us about his seminal book on design and our current book club Focus the book with the masochistic teapot cover the Design of Everyday things thank you so much Don um Welcome to our book club how are you thank you but hey that's the old book it is I'll show you an older one got the old one here the psychology of everyday things inde so the newer version though the uh when published in 2013 does have new material and different examples yes we um we've got a few questions about that I know people are Keen to know about that um we're joined in this hangout by a selection of ux Mastery Book Club members who all have some questions uh welcome to all of you through we'll come back to you in a minute um but to begin um Don the warmth and approachability in your writing are an inspiration to many of us who read your work can you start off uh today's discussion by telling us a little bit more about what's behind your excitement and advocacy for human centered design and how that sort of feeds into your process and thinking and indeed motion

um when you're writing well I started off as a GE I was an electrical engineer um about two degrees in electrical engineering and firmly believe that you know if only people would get out of the way our stuff would work much better then by a freak accident actually most of my life has been accidental and what I've learned to do is take advantage of these accidents and go into whole new fields and explore a new territory so by a freak accident I got attracted by the new newly revived psychology department in Pennsylvania where the new chair was a physicist and they were hiring people who had no background really in Psychology and so I went and talked to the chair who said you don't know anything about psychology wonderful and so I joined the psychology department and brought in information processing to psychology which was really quite far in those days and after I graduated my first job was at Harvard where George Miller had set up something called the Center for Cognitive studies and I didn't even know what the word cognitive meant and my real education in Psychology came when I was at the center at Harvard after a short stin there uh I went to the newly founded University uh at San Diego University of California San Diego got there before any students had graduated so it was just populated by very senior professors and a few Nobel laurates and graduate students and over the years I uh worked in the psychology department doing things in memory and learning and attention uh and how people do actions and I got actually quite interested in human error the kinds of errors that we make and that got me called in to investigate our major nuclear power accident The Three Mile Island accident M and there I discovered with a bunch of other people who were part of this committee we were trying to determine why the operators had made their errors that they did and we decided The Operators were really quite intelligent and sensible and everything they did was sensible except the design was so bad that if you wanted to cause people to make errors you couldn't have done a better job I mean 4,000 um meters and controls laid out in a need orderly way uh so that you might have a bank of 20 switches and then if you flipped one in the middle wrong people got mad at you yeah so that made me realize that this background I had in both engineering and psychology was really a good combination to look at real human behavior and that's where I started um first of all working with NASA in aviation safety and then Consulting with the newly developing computer industry uh I did a lot of work with what was called Xerox Park in those days the palow Alo Research Center and also with apple and as I did more and more of that I got more and more interested in the activity going on in Silicon Valley until I retired from the University I retired in 1993 and went up to Apple and became well eventually a vice president of the Advanced Technology Group and that's where I realized many different things one of them was um the difference between what academics know and what practitioners know and the difference between what how academics do things and practitioners so the joke I like to tell you is that um in in Academia there's a lot of deep thinking very little doing and an industry there's a tremendous amount of doing and very little thinking and so it's actually useful to go back and forth because the reason you don't do much thinking in industry is not because the people can't do it they're very bright they're really good people but there's no time everything is a rush no matter what you're doing there's a rush there's a competitive rush there's a rush to get out in time for a Christmas break or get time for New Year's or for the start of school or whatever and it takes two or three years to do a major project and even so it's always a rush in fact in um in the new edition of Design of Everyday Things because the was written before I got to Apple many years ago and so now 25 years later I've learned a lot so the fundamental principles haven't changed but I was able to update the examples which were out of date and put it in two new chapters about life in the real world and we exp I explained the design process and how we first try to make sure we solve the right problem and do design research and then we do rapid prototyping and we test and so on well when you actually come to do it in a team in a product team you not allowed to and here's what happens the person says yes what you're saying the person in charge the product manager what you're saying you should do is absolutely the correct way to do it uh but we're really sorry but we just don't have time uh this right now so next time we'll do it right there is no next time and so I invented Don Norman's law which says that the day the product team is put together it's over its budget and it's behind schedule so that's sort of a nutshell how I arrived at where I am so I really like working in industry and working in academics and going back and forth and when I was pulled out of my second retirement to start this New Design Lab I decided first of all I would not work in a department or a school I would work across the entire University and second of all I would work closely with a lot of Industry so that we would work on Wheel problems instead of the toy problems that most academic work is about yeah and so that's getting off to a nice start so that's a beginning very good um Stephanie had a question about if you could go back and change the book so just following on from what you were saying there is there anything I mean you had the 2013 edition um we're coming up to 30 years next year is there anything about the way that Design's changed recently that you might consider including additional material

for not really um design is undergo to Rapid change um and my book is primarily concerned with the com the physical components and the way we interact uh with products so there's very little about services and also very little about the kind of work that I'm actually doing in the Design Lab so we decided that we would not start a traditional design department and make traditional products or even traditional Services because I thought you know there's lots of really good design schools all around the world and we don't really need another one what we decided to do is we to work on complex problems systems complex socio Technical Systems so we're working in education where we trying to do self-taught so if you need something you just go and find on the internet the course and take it and that will really change education a lot instead of going to college for four years and then graduate school for another two or so on I guess in the British it's go to college for three years and then two years for a masters um and that supposed to last you the rest of your life nah so a lot of us are even thinking why even get a degree at all why don't you just take the courses that have the knowledge that you need at the moment and then as you learn and need more knowledge take those courses and all the general purpose knowledges like philosophy and history and other things uh literature if they bore you don't take them because as you mat sure guess what you'll discover oh the history is fascinating or the philosophical basis is fascinating and then you go off and learn it and you learn it when you really want to you learn it so much better it will matter a lot more so we're doing that and we're doing Ed we're doing Healthcare which is a mess because it was monstrous and it was never designed and it ends up in with 20 30 50 different Specialties and a patient goes from one specialist to the next the next and information is lost all along the way medical error is thought of as the as one of the top three causes of death that's crazy and we're looking at other things as well the role of Automation and how people interact with automation so that though some of the stuff that we do there fits into the last couple chapters of the book actually fits into all of the book but it to treat it properly requires its own book and um I may yet do that so you mentioned that you know with a field that is changing so rapidly people can um do their own learning online short courses take things as interest them are there things that you think that um in the speed and sort of haste of all of that might get overlooked the sort of the nuanced um things that design students should really learn but they wouldn't of their own initiative that they might miss out on if they just did their own sort of self-guided

learning well again when we say design students we have to talk about what kind of students uh traditional design students come in art and architecture uh schools and they're learn they basically learn the craft and I think that the work that's done by these types of designers is wonderful and beautiful and it makes my life better and I'm really delighted I buy these products uh the kinds of problems I'm talking about though require a very different kind of training we have to know more about the world and about organizations and about politics uh why does a designer have to know about politics well when you're talking about complex Endeavors trying to restructure education or health care or Transportation they uh affect large numbers of people and therefore if it's a big project no matter what you suggest people will object and you have to figure out some careful path through all these objections to getting anything done and that's what politics is about the good side of politics it's the art of compromise when people with honest differences of opinion meet and then try to figure out a way out of you know compromise it satisfies as many as possible the bad part of politics is when they refuse to discuss other Alternatives or when it's driven by greed or profit but it's but you have to deal with all of this because in the real world if I want to change the transportation system or education system it's amazing how many people will come out objecting so we need to learn how to deal with that and how to divide the problem up into small little meaningful parts that we can actually do without too much objection so instead of doing one large solution we do many Tiny Steps that's a good um segue into some of these questions that um our hangout participants um have Dan you had um a really interesting question about um about sort of checklists about things to do and not to do did you want to ask Don

that question that's funny yeah it was an older question but I'll take it anyways d i was essentially asking what a ver of what Luke just asked which was do you think that there's something lost um from like lists of dos and don'ts online and um do you think that they're neglecting a problem to solve or context at all y yes good I can say more but yeah I mean come on anytime there's a list of dos and don'ts is oversimplified and in fact anytime you have a list of fundamental principles I but you have to be careful they often conflict with each other uh I want it to be as easy and simple as possible but I also want to do the things that fit people's real needs and people's real needs are not simple and so the real question then is not how do I balance that but how do I fulfill the needs but make it still understandable I mean one of my Pat peeves is these devices uh and I blame actually JN Johnny I um the lead designer at Apple who's a brilliant industrial designer but taught as a crafts person now his stuff is beautiful he loves his videos always talk about how he could machine the metal so look the body is one piece of metal and the way it feels looks and the rounded corners and the lack of scenes wonderful but he completely is he's completely ignorant about how people interact with these devices and so the modern iPhone is getting to be little more and more difficult to use you may not agree but just think about how many times you're not sure whether you should tap once or twice or three times or a long tap or a short tap or with one finger two fingers or three fingers whether you swipe up or down or left or right there's no way of knowing that the fundamental principle of discoverability is has been lost even though Apple was one of the companies that invented that principle we don't get feedback how many times did you you take your phone and you flip through and find a photo you want to show somebody you give it to somebody else and they touch the screen and so it's lost there's no way to go back you have to start all over again and I hate it when I give a talk and I have and people want to take pictures of me when they have a camera it's wonderful they take the camera out and go when they have a cell phone they give it to somebody else to take the picture and the other person touches the wrong thing and loses the camera and it goes back and forth and so what ought to be a 5-second job is a minute job and when there are 20 people in line that's a lot of time a lot of the language around usability and human Center design contains assumptions that Simplicity is the ideal goal for a designer is this I have a book just the opposite can more rewarding when we include Nuance yeah because people don't want Simplicity they claim they do but they're Mis they really don't what they want is to understand because if you give somebody something that they can understand they say see how simple it is and if you make it simple there's just one button uh okay but how many things does it do it does 20 things so how do you make one button do 20 things it ends up looking simple but it's incredibly complex to use so people don't want Simplicity they want understanding um Nan did you have um a question for Don about pros and cons of being a ux

unicorn uh yeah uh don so my question is say for ux career uh what are the pros of cons of being a ux unicorn versus specializing in a certain area on ux so what do you mean by unicorn um what I meant was someone who's uh up to date and uh working professionally across from research to design to testing across the fields of ux or like special versus specializing in one area maybe design or research or uh maybe testing or maybe interaction design just one area uh I think the way we would form that question is uh whether you should be a specialist or be a generalist yeah and the answer is it's all up to you that uh they're different and some people just love learning more and more about the particular skills and particular focus of their work and these people are very important we need them there are other people uh who love who just like a lot like to work on different problems every time so they know a little bit about lots of areas and they're called upon and usually you're suddenly thrown into a medical problem or you're thrown into a transportation some banking problem you don't know anything about it and that's what makes it exciting because you have to quickly learn you have to find the experts those other people those Specialists and have them teach you and put it all together and so you need a team of Specialists and generalists and I believe these are different kinds of people and that uh it really has to be your choice as to which direction you just feel naturally inclined okay um Erin did you have a question around um strategies for convincing uh companies about the value of ux

uh your microphone is muted yeah sorry let me unmute my microphone um my question was do you have any specific analogies descriptions or strategies that you use to convince companies or departments that ux is worth their time and investment um that's probably my most frequently Asked question oh I was trying to be your least frequently Asked question original no uh when you work in a if you're in the University you don't think of that question when you work in a company it comes up all the time how do we demonstrate the value of our stuff to the higher level Executives and um I believe that user that designers are Their Own Worst Enemy that well let's take a look at user Center design or human centered design the fun fundamental principle is understand your customer understand who you're doing this for so if you're working in a banking company and you're trying to do some new Financial product who is your customer everyone pretty much who's your most important customer uh stakeholders not sure I guess people that your most important customer is your boss or maybe your boss's boss right and if you're working at a design uh firm a design consultancy your customer is your client and the way I like to explain it to designers is your job is to get your client or your boss promoted so what we say is learn and understand the customer what they need so what's why don't we understand better what your client needs or what your boss's boss needs not your boss probably understands what you're doing it's the boss of your boss or their boss and in a company mostly it's governed by yeah we have to stay alive we have to make money we need profits are not evil there are such things as evil profits but if you don't make Prof money the company goes out of business so it doesn't matter how great the company so what we have to do to convince management our value is to talk to them in the language they understand which is profits margins sales decrease costs when you talk to the marketing people when they say we must add these three features to the product how do they convince management they don't talk much about the three features they show a little spreadsheet which they show see we add this and here's the increased sales profits how do they know when I tell designers about this designers say well we don't know how do we know those numbers and I say how do marketing people know and the answer is they don't know they make it up they lie and we can make things up and lie just as well as they can but it's not quite that simple because the executives that you're talking to they've done this themselves they know that you're making up the numbers they also know that however there's no better way and so you have to make it up in a very logical sensible way that when they look them over it feels reasonable but that's the point if you want to convince people in a company about your worth you have to talk to them and what really matters to them which is that increased sales increased profits decreased costs less service calls and you have to document that what you should not do is say we do beautiful work and the customers tell us how much they love it because what an executive will say is of course you do that's why we hired you now goodbye I have to go back to work this is interesting um conversation we're talking about the the potential for businesses to um you know evil profits and using the power of business for good Donna's asked a question Donna's not here but um she asked a question are you familiar with transition design which is um a design approach to Wicked problems that proposes design Le societal transition towards more sustainable Futures so it's kind of using it's a field of human Center design that's centered on um solving the wicked problems of things like poverty and disease and stuff like that well yeah it's interesting that we

invent a new kind of design every couple of weeks so no I've never heard the term transactional design but um actually what I'm doing is just that I'm working on Wicked problems and we're trying to figure out how to best do them and um we actually have a paper called design X in the new Journal sh g s a ji it it's a journal a really I an excellent Journal that comes from China from uh Tong G University in Shanghai China but the articles are truly excellent and I wrote a very large article called design x uh with Peter Yan Stoppers who's a friend who teaches at Del in the Netherlands about how one should approach these kinds of problems and in fact we were inspired by a story from the Royal College of Arts the Joint program they have with Imperial College that looked at the ambulance system in London and they said it's really all backwards so ambulances stay at the hospitals so then when there's a call they have to rush to where the injured person is and then rush them back to the hospital why don't the ambulances be where the injured people are that is they should be located throughout the city where we know there's apt to be difficulties accidents injuries and then we'll be closer we can pick them up and bring them back and we should actually redesign the ambulances to have a better assortment equipment and telecommunication gear show The Physicians back at the hospital know exactly what's happening and either can give us advice on the way in or are ready for us when we arrive and so this was a very long project they redesigned ambulances they redesigned the structure they redid the hospital systems that won prizes for it the mayor of London loved it and he they gave a

talk on this at our design X conference in Shanghai and I said in the question period well that's really exciting so now it's 10 years since that work was done and so tell me how it's accepted by the city and the answer is nothing ever happened it was such a big problem that nobody people loved it and people hated it and the Union ated it and everybody rose up in opposition and nothing happened and that's what really led us to realize you have to do things in really small steps the other thing that we're looking at is we call it citizen science or maybe citizen involvement so a really good example there are people all around the world by the way who when they have a problem they start solving it themselves I was just in Lisbon last week and there's a wonderful group called patient Innovations where they help patients help themselves so there the one of their favorite stories is a little boy who lost part of his arm in an accident and um people made fun of him and he had clumsy Prosthetics but he realized he could make his own Prosthetics so actually with some help he redesigned an arm and 3D printed it and attached it to his arm and now actually he says all his friends are jealous they wish they could have such neat colorful wonderful arms you can even change it you know change the armor change your clothes and so on and another story is diabetes this

will take too long to tell you but diabetes problems have problems in which they have to always be measuring their blood for blood sugar level and then deciding whether they should get a squirt of insulin or take some candy some sweet some sugar and uh to get what's called an artificial pancreas basically a machine that does that automatically we can do that but to receive permission to build and sell that requires five or six years as much as a billion dollars of clinical testing the Federal Drug Administration in the United States and the equivalent in the EU or in Britain uh are well they're very careful what happened was a bunch of people said well hell we can do it ourselves so they found the continuous glucose monitor and they took it apart and figured out how it worked and published it on the internet so you could take those signals and send them out on the internet you could look see what your blood level was on your cell phone and someone else did the same with an insulin pu and then a group of people all got together and put together the software that couples the glucose meter with the insulin pump that they're wearing it some 200 people now have built their own insulin pump without a permission and they're leading really great lives and as a result by the way the medical fion is learning a tremendous amount about this and one of the nice things that I like is that one of the companies decom that made the continuous glucose monitor when they discovered that this person had taken it apart and published how it worked on the internet their response was actually was pretty neat their response was to hire him and say that's wonderful work we want you to keep doing it and so I think the fact that people can do their own work and here's going to change design a lot because there are new powerful design tools that don't take much skill to use or to learn there are new powerful making tools like 3D printers and laser cutters and 3D printers are changing dramatically they're not just these little cheap things that dribble stuff on top but there's laser centering and there's other types of methods and there're all sorts of fabrication methods that everyday people can learn to use and do wonderful things but usually they're very crude and don't work really well but they show you the potential and now the professional designer can come in and can work with the people and make things much more elegant and better and maybe less expensive and you can make it you can learn how to manufacture it in large numbers as opposed to the small ones but working together with people is a whole new way of doing things fantastic we're about out of time um but one uh final question before you go don what uh design or psychology books are on your bedside table at the moment

none do what I am reading I do a tremendous amount of reading and um I'm reading first of all history of technology is of great interest and second of all economic forecasts about what is what are we coming to how are the world going to be changing so most of my books are business models and they're I'm very concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence which if done wrong is going to replace us and I'm trying to working with people trying to say look these deep learning skills that are done by neural networks they're really good at finding something but we have no idea why or how we can't ask them any questions how do we change that and so uh that's what I've been reading about and learning about and working with people who do it and um and the citizen science movement so there's a person at MIT Eric Von hipple on a lot of work he call lead user Innovation so I've been reading his works as well but I also travel a lot as I say I was in Lisbon last week and prior to that in Madera where there's this wonderful joint program between Madera University of Lisbon and Carnegie melon University and a few other universities actually and it's we have a really good group of people looking at interesting problems in an island economy because Madera is a really interesting place it's a small island it's Portuguese but it's really off the coast of Africa and there's a wonderful migratory fish pattern and climate pattern that can be studied there that will actually impact the whole world so that's what I do in my spare time fantastic let's wrap things up there thank you very much indeed um it's been fascinating conversation thank you to everyone who asked question questions um if you've been watching and still have some questions um please do join us to continue discussion your ex Mastery forums we'll po post a list for you a link for you and thank you to you Don is good thank you very much for taking time out from your busy schedule to share with us you're quite welcome thank you everybody that's all for today see you all next time bye