A collection of 31 posts

I'm frequently asked how to find a job or a place to study, either in industrial design or user-interface design (Human-Computer Interaction). Rather than answer it anew each time, let me summarize my answer here. You either need real work experience or a graduate degree, or both. I cannot tell ...

Ask Don was just sent this description, with an implied question. Yesterday I had business to attend to in a city building downtown Portland. The building is new and this was my first

An industrial Designer just asked (edited slightly): What is the industrial design's value in the future? With electronics  getting smaller and smarter, it seems that we don't need industrial

Can users be part of the design team? Although the politically correct answer is "yes," I propose the opposite. Everyday people are not designers. Moreover, they probably don't even understand their own real needs. Leave design to professionals. Then again, to ignore those who would use your sys...

This really isn't a question, but I turned it into one.  My correspondent sent the following story: A friend of mine was at a meeting where someone from Philips explained the

"Ask Don" recently received this request from Mark Østergaard, from Denmark on behalf of a design group: "We would like to address the problem of vandalism, graffiti-painting, smashed windows, etc.

(Updated July 2012 from an earlier essay on finding a job.) I'm frequently asked how to find a job or a place to study, either in industrial design or user-interface design (Human-Computer Interaction). Rather than answer it anew each time, let me summarize my answer here. You either need real ...

In your article Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful you say that "activities are not the same as tasks," but are scenarios the same as tasks? In my line of work (web application

What do you think about convergence in mobile devices? In next decade, will everyone carry around personal phone-videocamera-musicplayer-television-(dis)organizers? To keep it simple, we could just call them PPVMTDO's. I

Will you, one day, do a review of toilet paper holders found in commercial restrooms? Virtually all of them are user-hostile. And we all encounter them, every day. (This question is obviously referring

It looks like developers are creating fewer desktop applications and instead investing in web applications and web services. Just for the sake of argument, let's say Microsoft lost control of the

I'd like to ask your opinion on the design of the Shuffle mp3 player by Apple from a usability point of view. I'm asking this question because BusinessWeek quotes

For someone who writes about design, how come your books are so badly designed? (Note from Don Norman: This is a distillation of many comments I receive, frequently. In The Design of Everyday

I've heard so many times that if you're a designer seeking for a great insight, you have to get far from your PC: flip a magazine, look out the

(Spelling in the original note corrected, but otherwise, this is as it was received) I have a problem in my current project, I tried to drive the design to a children-kind of interface,

One of the primary lessons I learned from your book, Emotional Design, is that designing products to induce certain emotions can make them more usable, can increase their functionality if you like. In