This was a really interesting reading on the principles of good design. A lot of considerations mentioned by Don Norman seem obvious from the user standpoint but are often forgotten by product designers. Norman goes in depth regarding the principles he sees as crucial for designing good products, especially products with increasing functional complexity.
This reading is archaic. After all, the latest technologies mentioned here include new types of landline telephones. But everything mentioned here is relevant in the Web age. Even now, we still see complicated products in the market that need you to search for an instruction manual on Google. And UI/UX is a very important consideration on websites and applications. Yet many websites fail at one or more of Norman’s principles of good design: providing good conceptual models, making things visible, mapping, or feedback. A common example is the fact that a lot of websites that are mapped well on desktops completely lose all sense of mapping on mobile, even when (and sometimes especially when) using the mobile version of the website. An example from the application side of things might be Slack, whose problems range from the fact that separate channels usually do not display notifications if not actively logged into them (at least in my experience), the interface that seems hostile to new users with its multiple menus of options (some of which don’t visibly change anything), and notification “quiet hours” being turned on by default. Many of these problems have slowly been fixed by updates, yet Discord, or even WhatsApp, feels like a better alternative to Slack as a group messaging service. Which is not to say that the other two apps don’t have their own UX problems either.
To close off, the final line about the paradox of technology struck a chord with me. “Added complexity and difficulty cannot be avoided when functions are added, but with clever design, they can be minimized.” This, after all, is the very principle of UX design.