The Design of Everyday Things · Donald Norman

The idea

Norman argues that a well-designed object communicates by itself which actions it allows and returns an understandable signal of what has happened. When either of those two things is missing, the error is attributed to the person using it rather than to the design. The book is about doors and kitchens, and it describes a software problem with precision.

Why it matters to us

We work with systems that act on processes, and the absence of a signal is our most expensive failure. A process that runs without returning evidence of its effect behaves exactly like the door you have to push that looks as though you pull it: it works, and everyone who uses it believes they got it wrong.

What we question

Norman’s formulation is individual: one person facing one object. In an operation, the person who launches the action, the one who authorises it and the one who observes the result are usually three different people, and sometimes none of them is human. The signal has to survive that distribution, and the book does not go that far.

What changed

We stopped treating the trace as a technical record and started designing it as a return of information: what was executed, what was confirmed and what was observed, written for whoever has to decide next.

What it connects to

It connects to the difference between logging an action and observing its result, to the capability of evaluation and observability, and to the question of what it means that a bot has finished a task.