Don Norman: the scientist who said bad design is not your fault

From circuits to the human mind

Donald Norman graduated in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1957. He then went to the University of Pennsylvania hoping to study computers, but the university did not yet offer computer courses. He finished a master's degree in electrical engineering in 1959 and then changed direction completely, earning a PhD in psychology in 1962.

After four years at Harvard University's Center for Cognitive Studies, he joined the psychology department at the University of California, San Diego. There he founded the Cognitive Science Department. For years his work was about memory, attention and how people process information.

“I decided that if I couldn't study computers, I would study the human brain--the other computational device.”

— Don Norman, via The Franklin Institute

Doors, switches and a famous book

The turn towards design came from real accidents. The Franklin Institute records that while consulting on the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, Norman realised that his mix of engineering and psychology could be used to study design. His research moved to aviation safety and computers.

Then, on a sabbatical in England, he found himself frustrated by simple things like working doors and light switches. Instead of blaming himself, he started studying everyday objects. The result was The Psychology of Everyday Things, published in 1988 and later renamed The Design of Everyday Things.

The book argues that when people struggle with objects and interfaces, the design is usually at fault, not the person. It gave designers words that are still used every day: affordances, mappings, feedback and conceptual models. One chapter title of the 2013 revised edition sums up the idea: Human Error? No, Bad Design. That edition added the idea of signifiers and replaced the old examples with new ones.

The first User Experience title

In 1993 Norman retired from UC San Diego for the first time and joined Apple as an Apple Fellow. He became the User Experience Architect of a small three-person team called the User Experience Office. Nielsen Norman Group notes that this was the first use of the term User Experience in a job title, long before anyone said UX. He later served as a vice president at Apple.

He went on to work at Hewlett-Packard, co-founded the consulting firm Nielsen Norman Group with Jakob Nielsen, and taught at Northwestern University, where he co-directed a programme combining an MBA with engineering and design. In 2014 he returned to UC San Diego as founding director of its Design Lab and retired from that role at the end of 2020.

In 2006 the Franklin Institute gave him the Benjamin Franklin Medal for developing the field of user-centred design. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and a co-founder of the CHI community, which gave him its lifetime achievement award. His later books include Emotional Design and Design for a Better World.

The skills and habits that made the difference

The first was crossing fields. Norman was an engineer who studied the mind. That pairing let him see a confusing control panel both as a machine and as a puzzle for a human brain. UI/UX design still sits exactly there, between technology and psychology.

The second was noticing small frustrations. A door you cannot open or a switch you cannot match to its light is easy to ignore. He treated each one as evidence of a design problem worth explaining.

The third was refusing to blame the user. His work reframed human error as a sign that the design did not fit people. That habit of asking what the product did wrong, before asking what the person did wrong, is the heart of user-centred design.

The fourth was teaching in plain words. His books are written for ordinary readers, not only for specialists, which is one reason his ideas spread so widely.