A Conversation with Don Norman

Talking about DOET:

"In the first draft I said, "It's the designers who're wrong. Stupid designers. How could somebody be so incompetent? How could someone design such a lousy product." ... 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."

On his working at Apple

"I work in a group we call the "user experience architects office" because we want to emphasize the experience of working with a particular technology, how the experience feels. We call ourselves architects because that's what we do. We worry about high-level structure and functionality and we don't do the detail design, which gets done later. "

On the PC

"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."

And, in line with his comments about the Swiss army knife: I'm reminded of Alan Cooper's focus on designing for one user. He gives an example in Inmates about a car design gone wrong: The father with a midlife crisis wants a sports car, the kid wants a pickup, and the mom wants a minivan. Cooper relates that such a product could never exist.
Ahhh, beware the Cassandra on the walls of Troy: See this horse:
http://www.ford.com/en/ourVehicles/allVehicles/fordExplorerSportTrac.htm
Be afraid...be very afraid....
joe

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