October 26, 2026 · Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (revised edition) · Nonfiction · About 4 minutes
You reach a door with a tall vertical handle. You pull. Nothing happens. You push, and it opens. For half a second you feel foolish; then you see somebody behind you make the same mistake. Norman uses doors, switches, and other ordinary objects to make a disarming point: when a product gives the wrong clue about how to use it, the mistake is not necessarily a defect in the person using it. His revised book examines signifiers, mapping, feedback, and the ways people blame themselves for confusing interactions.[3]
A handle tells a story before any written instruction does. It suggests something to grasp and pull. A flat plate suggests a push. This is not an inviolable law of doors; it is an example of the relation between an action and the clue that makes that action discoverable. Norman later clarified that designers should care about what people perceive they can do, not only what an object technically permits.[4]
The interesting part is what happens after the door. People often respond to recurring friction by demanding more discipline from themselves: remember the right button, memorize the hidden sequence, pay closer attention next time. Sometimes that is reasonable. But if a capable person repeatedly makes the same error, the environment is also worth examining. Is the next action visible? Does the result tell them whether it worked? Does the system make the dangerous option easier than the safe one? Norman devotes a chapter to the provocative question of human error and bad design, while also including a section on cases where people really are at fault.[3]
My reading is not that personal responsibility disappears. It is that responsibility is more useful when it includes the person who shaped the choices. A designer who says “users should read the manual” may be protecting a fragile interface. A user who says “I am just bad at this” may miss a repairable cause. Neither conclusion helps us learn what actually happened.
There is an important counterweight: not every difficulty should be engineered away. A door marked “staff only” may need to be deliberately hard to enter. A consequential financial action may warrant an extra confirmation. Norman's revised preface also acknowledges constraints that a neat usability slogan can hide: cost, schedules, competition, emotion, and the realities of getting a product adopted.[2] Better design is not the absence of all friction. It is making the right things easy and the risky things appropriately considered.
Suppose a shared spreadsheet keeps collecting mistakes. A teammate enters a percentage as 25 instead of 0.25; another pastes into the wrong column. You could remind everyone to be careful. You might also make the expected units visible, validate the input range, distinguish editable cells from calculated ones, and show an example beside the field. These are my examples, not scenes from Norman's book. The goal is not to remove judgment; it is to stop spending judgment on deciphering a poorly explained form.
The same lens can be applied gently to your own routines. If you repeatedly forget an item when leaving home, perhaps a reminder beside the door beats another vow to become a more organized person. If a habit depends on finding equipment buried in a cupboard, moving it into view may matter more than a motivational speech. But be honest about the limit: an accessible pair of running shoes cannot decide your priorities for you. A good setup reduces avoidable confusion; it does not do the living.
A two-minute exercise: Pick one small mistake that happened more than once this month. Draw a line down a page. On one side write, “What did I intend?” On the other, “What did the environment suggest or hide?” Change one clue: a label, default, location, example, or confirmation. Then see whether the mistake becomes less likely. If it does not, revise your explanation rather than scolding yourself harder.
The next time a door makes you feel clumsy, notice the clue it offered. That small pause can turn embarrassment into a better question: what would make the correct action easier to see?
[2] https://jnd.org/preface-design-of-everyday-things-revised-edition — Don Norman preface [3] https://jnd.org/books/the-design-of-everyday-things-revised-and-expanded-edition — Don Norman book overview [4] https://jnd.org/affordances-and-design — Don Norman on affordances