A Conversation with Don Norman

An old DON NORMAN INTERVIEW, the noted UI/CHI/SIGIA (ugh!) expert who wrote The Design of Everyday Things, and worked at Apple. Some decent snippets:

I never look back at the stuff I've done. I look forward to where I'm going. This actually makes it hard for me to give talks because I get invited to speak about ideas of mine that may be five even ten years old. That's dull. If I don't do a dramatically new thing each year and learn a new topic, then I'll stagnate. It's part of my philosophy of life, to always push off in different directions.

There are no "dumb decisions." Everybody has a problem to solve. What makes for bad design is trying to solve problems in isolation, so that one particular force, like time or market or compatibility or usabilility, dominates.

But how on earth do we make smooth, working prototypes before we've even thought through the ideas? Of course, the only way is to actually try new ideas out, that's when we find out if we want them. I have a feeling that as fast as the prototyping tools are developed our needs for them will grow even faster. So maybe we'll always be complaining about the lack of tools.

As I've said before, I believe our machines have just become too complex. When one machine does everything, it in some sense does nothing especially well, although its complexity increases. My Swiss Army knife is an example: It is very valuable because it does so many things, but it does none of the single things as well as a specialized knife or a screwdriver or a scissors. My Swiss Army knife also has so many tools I don't think I ever open the correct one first. Whenever I try to get the knife, I always get the nail file and whenever try to get the scissors, I get the awl, etc. It's not a big deal but it's only about six parts. Imagine a computer with hundreds or thousands of "parts." I think the correct solution is to create devices that fit the needs of people better, so that the device "looks like" the task.