Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Donald Norman Design Principles
Donald Norman Design Principles
Donald Norman Design Principles
by.
There are many principles of design. But when it comes to web and interaction design,
Donald Norman is one of the greats of computer human interaction and user-centred design
(he did, after all, coin the term) and his principles are a good place to start with any design
project.
Norman's main idea is that devices, things, computers, and interfaces should be functional,
easy to use, and intuitive. His idea is that there are two gulfs to avoid: the gulf of execution
Say you want to delete a photo from Facebook. Your goal is to delete it, and the end result
is it being deleted.
What happens in between is the gulf of execution, e.g. clicking a button that says 'delete'.
This gulf is small where there are only a few roadblocks (like when you're deleting a photo).
It's much larger when there are lots of roadblocks, like having lots of fields in a contact
form.
The gulf of evaluation is when a user is expecting feedback from a system, and the system
either doesn’t provide the feedback at all or, alternatively, doesn't give the feedback the user
is expecting.
Think of an ecommerce site. You've entered your credit card details and clicked check out.
You expect a message to pop up saying 'well done! Now please continue to shop' if nothing
happens, you don't know what to do because the feedback you expected didn't happen, and
in fact no feedback happened at all. This confusion (which often results in panicky button
1. Visibility
Users need to know what all the options are, and know straight away how to access them. In
For example, use intuitive iconography that clearly indicates there are more options hiding
deeper down (for example, the Hamburger). This is even more important for mobile design,
when screen space is at a premium and there's a strong (STRONG) desire to get rid of
2. Feedback
Every action needs a reaction. There needs to be some indication, like a sound, a moving
dial, a spinning rainbow wheel, that the user’s action caused something.
Google Chrome does a great job of this when they're loading pages. The little spinning
circle starts as soon as you hit enter, so you know something's happening, and goes faster
when the page is about to load, so you know you're about to do something again. It’s simple
3. Affordance
Affordance is the relationship between what something looks like and how it's used.
For designers, it means that as soon as someone sees something, they have to know how to
use it. For example, a mug has high affordance: it's easy to figure out intuitively how to use
it. For web designers, affordance is even more important. Users need to be able to tell how
to access information they want from a website, or else they’ll just leave.
4. Mapping
Mapping is the relationship between control and effect. The idea is that with good design,
A great example of mapping is the vertical scroll bar. It tells you where you are in a page,
and as you drag it down, the page moves down at the same rate; control and effect are
closely mapped.
5. Constraints
Constraints are the limits to an interaction or an interface. Some are really obvious and
physical, for example the screen size on a phone. Others are more nuanced, like a single,
continuous page website having an image peeking onto the main page. It is logical for the
user to scroll down to see the next image, and thus the rest of the website.
6. Consistency
The same action has to cause the same reaction, every time.
If a website has a back button that sometimes turns a computer off, it becomes very hard to
navigate around the web. The same applies for visual consistency. Logos and brands have
power and recognition because they use the same logo. Twinings has used theirs for 227
years, and now everyone knows that a box with 'Twinings' written on it has tea inside it.