The Norman door
Don Norman started complaining about doors over 25 years ago. Doors shouldn’t need instructions – the shape of them can guide you through just fine. So why do so many doors need instruction manuals right on the side of them?
User-mandatory
Participatory Design History
A chapter of the Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design on the Heritage (aka history) of participatory design.
DDG on Users and Design
4 spreads from DDG – we suggest you read Anthropometric Design and User-Centered Design first, and then zoom out to Co-Design & Co-Creation.
How the Dumb Design of a WWII Plane Led to the Macintosh
Wired Magazine provides an excerpt from the book User Friendly by Cliff Kuang with Robert Fabricant. It tells the tale of how experimental psychologist Paul Fitts was brought into the Air Force to research recurring crashes in the B-17 Flying Fortress. Instead of “pilot error,” he saw what he called, for the first time, “designer error.”