Don Norman

Last updated

Don Norman
Donald Norman at AWF05.jpg
Norman in 2005
Born
Donald Arthur Norman

(1935-12-25) December 25, 1935 (age 88)
Nationality American
Alma mater MIT
University of Pennsylvania
Known for The Design of Everyday Things
Cognitive ergonomics
User-centered design
Scientific career
Fields Cognitive science
Usability engineering
Institutions Northwestern University
University of California, San Diego
Nielsen Norman Group
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Thesis Sensory Thresholds And Response Biases In Detection Experiments, A Theoretical And Experimental Analysis (1962)
Doctoral advisor R. Duncan Luce
Doctoral students
Website jnd.org [1]

Donald Arthur Norman (born December 25, 1935) [2] [3] is an American researcher, professor, and author. Norman is the director of The Design Lab at University of California, San Diego. [4] He is best known for his books on design, especially The Design of Everyday Things . He is widely regarded for his expertise in the fields of design, usability engineering, and cognitive science, [4] and has shaped the development of the field of cognitive systems engineering. [5] He is a co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, along with Jakob Nielsen. He is also an IDEO fellow and a member of the Board of Trustees of IIT Institute of Design in Chicago. He also holds the title of Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. Norman is an active Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), where he spends two months a year teaching.[ when? ]

Contents

Much of Norman's work involves the advocacy of user-centered design. [6] His books all have the underlying purpose of furthering the field of design, from doors to computers. Norman has taken a controversial stance in saying that the design research community has had little impact in the innovation of products, and that while academics can help in refining existing products, it is technologists that accomplish the breakthroughs. [7] To this end, Norman named his website with the initialism JND (just-noticeable difference) to signify his endeavors to make a difference. [1]

Early academics

In 1957, Norman received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). [8] Norman received an M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. [9] He received a PhD in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. [9] He was one of the earliest graduates from the Mathematical Psychology group at University of Pennsylvania and his advisor was Duncan Luce. [9]

After graduating, Norman took up a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard University [10] [11] and within a year became a lecturer.

After four years with the Center, Norman took a position as an associate professor in the Psychology Department at University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Norman applied his training as an engineer and computer scientist, and as an experimental and mathematical psychologist, to the emerging discipline of cognitive science. Norman eventually became founding chair of the Department of Cognitive Science and chair of the Department of Psychology.

At UCSD, Norman was a founder of the Institute for Cognitive Science and one of the organizers of the Cognitive Science Society (along with Roger Schank, Allan Collins, and others), which held its first meeting at the UCSD campus in 1979. [12] [ non-primary source needed ]

Together with psychologist Tim Shallice, Norman proposed a framework of attentional control of executive functioning.[ when? ] One of the components of the Norman-Shallice model is the supervisory attentional system. [13]

Cognitive engineering career

Norman made the transition from cognitive science to cognitive engineering by entering the field as a consultant and writer. His article "The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid" [14] in Datamation (1981) catapulted him to a position of prominence in the computer world.[ citation needed ] Soon after, his career took off outside of academia, although he still remained active at UCSD until 1993. Norman continued his work to further human-centered design by serving on numerous university and government advisory boards such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He currently[ when? ] serves on numerous committees and advisory boards like at Motorola, the Toyota National College of Technology, TED Conference, Panasonic, Encyclopædia Britannica and many more.

Norman was also part of a select team flown in to investigate the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident. [15]

In 1993, Norman left UCSD to join Apple Computer, initially as an Apple Fellow as a User Experience Architect (the first use of the phrase "User Experience" in a job title [16] [17] [ citation needed ]), and then as the Vice President of the Advanced Technology Group. He later worked for Hewlett-Packard before joining with Jakob Nielsen to form the Nielsen Norman Group in 1998. He returned to academia as a professor of computer science at Northwestern University, where he was co-director of the Segal Design Institute until 2010. In 2014, he returned to UCSD to become director of the newly established The Design Lab housed at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. [18]

Awards and honors

Norman has received many awards for his work. He received two honorary degrees, one "S. V. della laurea ad honorem" in Psychology from the University of Padua in 1995 and one doctorate in Industrial Design and Engineering from Delft University of Technology. [19] [9] In 2001, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and won the Rigo Award from SIGDOC, the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group (SIG) on the Design of Communication (DOC). [20] In 2006, he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. [8] In 2009, Norman was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Design Research Society. In 2011 Norman was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for the development of design principles based on human cognition that enhance the interaction between people and technology.[ citation needed ]

Nielsen Norman Group

Norman, alongside colleague Jakob Nielsen, formed the Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) in 1998. [21] The company's vision is to help designers and other companies move toward more human-centered products and internet interactions, and are pioneers in the field of usability. [21]

User-centered design

In 1986, Norman introduced the term "user-centered design" in the book User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-computer Interaction [22] , a book edited by him and by Stephen W. Draper. In the introduction of the book, the idea that designers should aim their efforts at the people who will use the system is introduced:

People are so adaptable that they are capable of shouldering the entire burden of accommodation to an artifact, but skillful designers make large parts of this burden vanish by adapting the artifact to the users. [22]

In his book The Design of Everyday Things , Norman uses the term "user-centered design" to describe design based on the needs of the user, leaving aside what he deems secondary considerations, such as aesthetics. User-centered design involves simplifying the structure of tasks, making things visible, getting the mapping right, exploiting the powers of constraint, designing for error, explaining affordances and the seven stages of action.[ citation needed ]

In his book The Things that Make Us Smart: Defending the Human Attribute in the Age of the Machine, [23] [ better source needed ] Norman uses the term "cognitive artifacts" to describe "those artificial devices that maintain, display, or operate upon information in order to serve a representational function and that affect human cognitive performance".[ citation needed ] Similar to his The Design of Everyday Things book, Norman argues for the development of machines that fit our minds, rather than have our minds be conformed to the machine.

On the Revised Edition of The Design of Everyday Things, Norman backtracks on his previous claims about aesthetics and removed the term User-Centered Design altogether. In the preface of the book, he says :

The first edition of the book focused upon making products understandable and usable. The total experience of a product covers much more than its usability: aesthetics, pleasure, and fun play critically important roles. There was no discussion of pleasure, enjoyment and emotion, Emotion is so important that I wrote an entire book, Emotional Design, about the role it plays in design. [24]

He instead currently uses the term human-centered design and defines it as: "an approach that puts human needs, capabilities, and behavior first, then designs to accommodate those needs, capabilities, and ways of behaving."[ citation needed ]

Bibliography

He is on numerous educational, private, and public sector advisory boards, including the editorial board of Encyclopædia Britannica . Norman published several important books during his time at UCSD, one of which, User Centered System Design, obliquely referred to the university in the initials of its title. This is a list of select publications.

Psychology books

Usability books

Other publications

See also

Related Research Articles

Usability engineering is a professional discipline that focuses on improving the usability of interactive systems. It draws on theories from computer science and psychology to define problems that occur during the use of such a system. Usability Engineering involves the testing of designs at various stages of the development process, with users or with usability experts. The history of usability engineering in this context dates back to the 1980s. In 1988, authors John Whiteside and John Bennett—of Digital Equipment Corporation and IBM, respectively—published material on the subject, isolating the early setting of goals, iterative evaluation, and prototyping as key activities. The usability expert Jakob Nielsen is a leader in the field of usability engineering. In his 1993 book Usability Engineering, Nielsen describes methods to use throughout a product development process—so designers can ensure they take into account the most important barriers to learnability, efficiency, memorability, error-free use, and subjective satisfaction before implementing the product. Nielsen’s work describes how to perform usability tests and how to use usability heuristics in the usability engineering lifecycle. Ensuring good usability via this process prevents problems in product adoption after release. Rather than focusing on finding solutions for usability problems—which is the focus of a UX or interaction designer—a usability engineer mainly concentrates on the research phase. In this sense, it is not strictly a design role, and many usability engineers have a background in computer science because of this. Despite this point, its connection to the design trade is absolutely crucial, not least as it delivers the framework by which designers can work so as to be sure that their products will connect properly with their target usership.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Unix philosophy</span> Software development philosophy

The Unix philosophy, originated by Ken Thompson, is a set of cultural norms and philosophical approaches to minimalist, modular software development. It is based on the experience of leading developers of the Unix operating system. Early Unix developers were important in bringing the concepts of modularity and reusability into software engineering practice, spawning a "software tools" movement. Over time, the leading developers of Unix established a set of cultural norms for developing software; these norms became as important and influential as the technology of Unix itself, and have been termed the "Unix philosophy."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Usability</span> Capacity of a system for its users to perform tasks

Usability can be described as the capacity of a system to provide a condition for its users to perform the tasks safely, effectively, and efficiently while enjoying the experience. In software engineering, usability is the degree to which a software can be used by specified consumers to achieve quantified objectives with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a quantified context of use.

A heuristic evaluation is a usability inspection method for computer software that helps to identify usability problems in the user interface design. It specifically involves evaluators examining the interface and judging its compliance with recognized usability principles. These evaluation methods are now widely taught and practiced in the new media sector, where user interfaces are often designed in a short space of time on a budget that may restrict the amount of money available to provide for other types of interface testing.

Interaction design, often abbreviated as IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." While interaction design has an interest in form, its main area of focus rests on behavior. Rather than analyzing how things are, interaction design synthesizes and imagines things as they could be. This element of interaction design is what characterizes IxD as a design field, as opposed to a science or engineering field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Skeuomorph</span> Design element borrowed from another medium

A skeuomorph is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues (attributes) from structures that were necessary in the original. Skeuomorphs are typically used to make something new feel familiar in an effort to speed understanding and acclimation. They employ elements that, while essential to the original object, serve no pragmatic purpose in the new system. Examples include pottery embellished with imitation rivets reminiscent of similar pots made of metal and a software calendar that imitates the appearance of binding on a paper desk calendar.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Affordance</span> Possibility of an action on an object or environment

In psychology, affordance is what the environment offers the individual. In design, affordance has a narrower meaning, it refers to possible actions that an actor can readily perceive.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to human–computer interaction:

The user experience (UX) is how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system or service. It includes a person's perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency. Improving user experience is important to most companies, designers, and creators when creating and refining products because negative user experience can diminish the use of the product and, therefore, any desired positive impacts; conversely, designing toward profitability often conflicts with ethical user experience objectives and even causes harm. User experience is subjective. However, the attributes that make up the user experience are objective.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">User interface design</span> Planned operator–machine interaction

User interface (UI) design or user interface engineering is the design of user interfaces for machines and software, such as computers, home appliances, mobile devices, and other electronic devices, with the focus on maximizing usability and the user experience. In computer or software design, user interface (UI) design primarily focuses on information architecture. It is the process of building interfaces that clearly communicate to the user what's important. UI design refers to graphical user interfaces and other forms of interface design. The goal of user interface design is to make the user's interaction as simple and efficient as possible, in terms of accomplishing user goals.

Affective design describes the design of user interfaces in which emotional information is communicated to the computer from the user in a natural and comfortable way. The computer processes the emotional information and adapts or responds to try to improve the interaction in some way. The notion of affective design emerged from the field of human–computer interaction (HCI), specifically from the developing area of affective computing. Affective design serves an important role in user experience (UX) as it contributes to the improvement of the user's personal condition in relation to the computing system. The goals of affective design focus on providing users with an optimal, proactive experience. Amongst overlap with several fields, applications of affective design include ambient intelligence, human–robot interaction, and video games.

James D. Hollan is professor of cognitive science and adjunct professor of computer science at the University of California, San Diego. In collaboration with Professor Edwin Hutchins, he directs the Distributed Cognition and Human–Computer Interaction Laboratory at UCSD, and co-directs the Design Lab. Hollan has also spent time working at Xerox PARC and at Bellcore. He was elected to the CHI Academy in 2003 and received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award in 2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kent Norman</span> American cognitive psychologist

Kent L. Norman is an American cognitive psychologist and an expert on computer rage. He graduated from Southern Methodist University in 1969 and earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Iowa in 1973.

User experience design defines the experience a user would go through when interacting with a company, its services, and its products. User experience design is a user centered design approach because it considers the user's experience when using a product or platform. Research, data analysis, and test results drive design decisions in UX design rather than aesthetic preferences and opinions. Unlike user interface design, which focuses solely on the design of a computer interface, UX design encompasses all aspects of a user's perceived experience with a product or website, such as its usability, usefulness, desirability, brand perception, and overall performance. UX design is also an element of the customer experience (CX), and encompasses all aspects and stages of a customer's experience and interaction with a company.

<i>The Design of Everyday Things</i> Book written by Donald Norman on human psychology in relation with everyday objects

The Design of Everyday Things is a best-selling book by cognitive scientist and usability engineer Donald Norman about how design serves as the communication between object and user, and how to optimize that conduit of communication in order to make the experience of using the object pleasurable. One of the main premises of the book is that although people are often keen to blame themselves when objects appear to malfunction, it is not the fault of the user but rather the lack of intuitive guidance that should be present in the design.

The term natural mapping comes from proper and natural arrangements for the relations between controls and their movements to the outcome from such action into the world. The real function of natural mappings is to reduce the need for any information from a user’s memory to perform a task. This term is widely used in the areas of human-computer interaction (HCI) and interactive design. Leveraging the concept of mapping helps bridge the gulf of evaluation and the gulf of execution, which refer to the gap between the user's understanding of the system and the actual state of the system and the gap between the user's goal and how to achieve that goal with the interface, respectively. By mapping controls to mirror the real world, the user will find it easier to create a mental model of the control and use the control to achieve their desired intention.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Human–computer interaction</span> Academic discipline studying the relationship between computer systems and their users

Human–computer interaction (HCI) is research in the design and the use of computer technology, which focuses on the interfaces between people (users) and computers. HCI researchers observe the ways humans interact with computers and design technologies that allow humans to interact with computers in novel ways. A device that allows interaction between human being and a computer is known as a "Human-computer Interface (HCI)".

Cognitive engineering is a method of study using cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience to design and develop engineering systems to support or improve the cognitive processes of users.

Soft ergonomics is the study of designing virtual interfaces that cater towards the wellness of the human body, its emotional and cognitive abilities.

S. Joy Mountford is known for her work in the field of computer-human interaction and interface design. From 1986 to 1994, she was Head of the Human Interface Group at Apple Computer where she helped developing QuickTime. In 2012, Mountford won the Lifetime Practice Award from SIGCHI and joined the CHI Academy.

References

  1. 1 2 "What does jnd.org mean?". Just-Noticeable Difference. Archived from the original on June 16, 2014. Retrieved April 20, 2018.
  2. ↑ Royal-Lawson, James; Axbom, Per (August 24, 2016). "Design Doing with Don Norman". Medium. UX Podcast. Retrieved November 14, 2019. Per: Born in 1935. James: Yeah, he actually turned 80 around about the same time as we had a Twitter conversation about this interview. Per: Exactly. It was December 25.
  3. ↑ "ISNI 0000000122839155 - Donald A. Norman ( 1935- )". International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI). Retrieved November 14, 2019.
  4. 1 2 Robbins, Gary (2014). "Don Norman has designs on your life". San Diego Union Tribune. Retrieved February 12, 2019.
  5. ↑ Klein, G.; Wiggins, S.; Deal, S. (March 2008). "Cognitive Systems Engineering: The Hype and the Hope". Computer. 41 (3): 95–97. doi:10.1109/MC.2008.81. ISSN   0018-9162. S2CID   38587194.
  6. ↑ Zachry, Mark (October 2005). "An Interview with Donald Norman". Technical Communication Quarterly. 14 (4): 469. doi:10.1207/s15427625tcq1404_5. S2CID   142989547.
  7. ↑ Norman, Donald (December 5, 2009). "Technology First, Needs Last" . Retrieved January 26, 2010.
  8. 1 2 "Donald Norman". The Franklin Institute. January 15, 2014. Retrieved November 13, 2019.
  9. 1 2 3 4 "In Honor Of… Donald Norman". Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences (FABBS). August 30, 2016. Retrieved November 13, 2019.
  10. ↑ "Transcript: A Chat with Don Norman". UX Mastery. 2017. Retrieved November 13, 2019.
  11. ↑ Cohen-Cole, Jamie (2014). The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature. University of Chicago Press. pp. 176, 183. ISBN   9780226092331 – via Google Books.
  12. ↑ Norman, Donald (November 14, 2008). "Donald Norman Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on February 3, 2010. Retrieved January 26, 2010.
  13. ↑ Friedenberg, Jay; Gordon Silverman (2010). Cognitive Science: An Introduction of the Study of Mind. United St ates of America: SAGE Publications. pp. 180–182. ISBN   978-1-4129-7761-6.
  14. ↑ Norman, Don (1981). "The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid" (PDF). Datamation. Vol. 27, no. 12. Archived from the original (PDF) on November 20, 2021.
  15. ↑ Ross, Chris (August 6, 2014). "User-Centric Design - The Lessons of 3 Mile Island". Mindflow Design. Retrieved April 14, 2018.
  16. ↑ Lialina, Olia (January 2015). "Rich User Experience, UX and Desktopization of War". Contemporary Home Computing. Retrieved September 25, 2016.
  17. ↑ Merholz, Peter (December 13, 2007). "Peter in Conversation with Don Norman About UX & Innovation". Adaptative Path. Archived from the original on October 18, 2016. Retrieved September 25, 2016.
  18. ↑ Robbins, Gary (October 24, 2014). "Don Norman has designs on your life". The San Diego Union-Tribune. Retrieved May 21, 2016.
  19. ↑ "Honorary Degrees". Università di Padova. Retrieved November 14, 2019. 01/03/1995 - Donald A. Norman, in Psychology
  20. ↑ "Rigo Award". Special Interest Group on Design of Communication. Archived from the original on February 19, 2020. Retrieved November 14, 2019.
  21. 1 2 Lyonnais, Sheena (August 28, 2017). "Where Did the Term "User Experience" Come From?". Adobe Blog. Archived from the original on July 30, 2020. Retrieved November 13, 2019. In 1998, he formed the Nielsen Norman Group alongside Jakob Nielsen, another pioneer of usability methods that remain widely used today, including the 10 Usability Heuristics.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  22. 1 2 Norman, Donald A.; Draper, Stephen W., eds. (1986). User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-computer Interaction. Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates. ISBN   0-89859-781-1. OCLC   12665902.
  23. ↑ Norman, Don (1993). Things That Make us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine. Pursues Book Group.
  24. ↑ Norman, Donald A. (November 5, 2013). The design of everyday things (Revised and expanded ed.). New York, New York. ISBN   9780465050659. OCLC   849801329.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  25. ↑ Oden, Gregg C.; Lopes, Lola L. (1997). "Human Information Processing: An Introduction to Psychology by Peter H. Lindsay, Donald A. Norman". The American Journal of Psychology. 110 (4): 635–641. doi:10.2307/1423414. JSTOR   1423414.
  26. ↑ http://www.ceri.memphis.edu/people/smalley/ESCI7205_misc_files/The_truth_about_Unix_cleaned.pdf [ bare URL PDF ]
  27. ↑ https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~jmarty/courses/LinuxStuff/NormanTheTroublewithUnix.ScanofDatamation1981.pdf [ bare URL PDF ]
  28. ↑ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/202165676_The_trouble_with_eUNIX_The_user_interface_is_horrid [ bare URL ]
  29. ↑ https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Trouble-With-Unix%3A-The-User-Interface-is-Horrid-Norman/a06aa39c0c5024a8c34addf5b12fa90333153a59 [ bare URL ]
Awards
Preceded by ACM SIGDOC Rigo Award
2001		Succeeded by
Preceded by Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science
2006		Succeeded by
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