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Title: Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman ISBN: 0-465-05135-9 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 23 December, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.62 (8 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: More Theory than Practice
Comment: I love Donald Norman. I love the work he does, and I love what he's taught me. I got so much from The Design of Everyday Things. I got something out of Things That Make Us Smart. I didn't get much out of this one at all.
I think this is because I'm an impatient reader. For example, I don't read fiction. I want to read facts about things I can apply in a practical way. This book is much more about theory than practical applications.
I'm sure some people love reading theory, and they will love this book. But if you're like me and really want a book to deliver information you can use on every page, you should buy The Design of Everyday Things instead, if you haven't already.
Rating: 4
Summary: Great Ideas on Product Design
Comment: People have needs, and products exist to fulfill those needs. People have a need for food, shelter, transportation and personal organization. Products like houses, cars and PDAs exist to fulfill these needs. It should go without saying that some needs are more important than others.
Don Norman has spent much of his life advocating for one of the fundamental needs that engineers often overlook: useability. This is human-centric or behavioral design.
In Emotional Design, Don Norman introduces the reader to the psychological underpinnings for this fundamental need, and finds that there are two other fundamental needs, too. These needs stem from the reflective, behavioral and visceral levels of cognition and affect. The visceral level is immediate and direct, reacting to the look, color or sound of a product and feeding in to the behavioral level. The behavioral level is concerned with how products function, and feeds in to and is affected by the reflective level. The reflective level is where we make value judgments, think about things, and where memory impacts our experiences.
As Norman states, people react to--and interact with--everything and everyone at all three levels; it's a basic fact of our psyche. Behavioral design, for which Norman has been an advocate for decades, works primarily at only the behavioral level. To make products that work even better, Norman argues that products must fully address people's (largely unspoken) needs at all three levels.
This isn't the same as "seeing people as needy, weak and emotionally dependent," as one reviewer claimed. Far from it: just as good behavioral design results in better communication with the user, Norman's intent with Emotional Design is that communication be further improved, and that it become a two-way street.
The value of this, as he shows in the beginning of the book, is that products work better when they interact with the user on the reflective and visceral levels in addition to the behavioral level.
Rating: 4
Summary: Worthwhile
Comment: I'm a huge fan of Donald A. Norman, and I'm working on reading every book he ever wrote. I'm now getting down to the very old and obscure ones like "Attention and Memory" (1968!). This new book combines the ideas of his previous work with some fascinating new psychological knowledge, so it is definitely worthwhile.
One thing that makes Norman such a good author is that he gives very graphic analogies to explain his ideas. One sentence that really made me think was that if robots had no idea whether something was safe or not, they could possibly just sit there, afraid to do anything - he likens this to confidence in humans. So it seems like thinking about how robots should work can only help figure out more about humans. That's why I think his new work on robotics adds yet another useful dimension to the work of a man whose focus has been a great blend of academia and business. Now he is tying more and more of those ideas together, blending them with collaboration and new research, so I hope he stays a prolific writer.
Unfortunately I was not everwhelmed by the book, but it is all very sensible and useful. I wish he had gotten more into the passion we feel when something is just superb. I have had that feeling when reading many similar books, like "The Tipping Point", "Don't Make Me Think", and even Norman's own "The Design of Everyday Things". So come to think of it, maybe writing one of those great books plus many other very good books is plenty to ask of a human being.
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Title: The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman ISBN: 0465067107 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 17 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do by B. J. Fogg ISBN: 1558606432 Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Pub. Date: December, 2002 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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Title: Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies) by Mike Kuniavsky ISBN: 1558609237 Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Pub. Date: 08 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $44.95 |
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Title: The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness by Virginia Postrel ISBN: 0060186321 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: September, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces by Carolyn Snyder ISBN: 1558608702 Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Pub. Date: 02 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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