Dan Norman takes a strictly humanistic stance in the opening of his book, which can be summed up nicely in this one line from the chapter: “It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.” His ideas are well informed and drawn from experience in both engineering and cognitive science, and I do in fact agree with him on the subject of the gap between designers’ faith in users who are willing to trial and error, and the very limited size of such a user base. Most people do really just want to get on with whatever they’re doing. However, the same people also want things to look nice. For example, almost all of us care about the aesthetic qualities of appliances we put in our homes. There’s people like the English couple mentioned in the book with the fancy washing machine, who don’t bother to learn about the machine’s functions but still keep the high-tech appliance around probably because it just looks nicer.
Another interesting case study would be SMEG, a home appliance company with a focus on design. They consistently get a bad rap for the poor quality of their products, which are simply not good investments. Yet, SMEG remains immensely popular, and consumer behavior shows that people are willing to pay much more for an appliance, be it of poorer quality, for something that just looks nice. Thus, I have this lingering question for Dan Norman: “so what?” Humans were born into an unbending, mystifying nature. But people still made it work, weaved clothes from flowers of cotton and learned to bake bread from grains. Now, is a washing machine with one too many functions really going to the nemesis to human development? Are we expected to be so lazy that reading a device manual becomes too much to ask? I’m really not talking about bad design — if I have to struggle to read text on a website in an avant-garde font, maybe that’s a design choice worth reevaluating. But some pretty doors that blend into a building’s facade, which can be swung open by pushing on either one of just two ends, shouldn’t really be that much of a headache to most people, considering once you’ve taken a minute to figure out which end to push, you can forever go on enjoying the nice design of a normally functioning door.