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UX Design

The Design of Everyday Things

Don Norman

Rev. & expanded ed.

If a user can't figure out your product, that's not a user problem. It's a design problem -- and Norman gives you the vocabulary to prove it.

About the book

Don Norman's foundational text argues there's no such thing as human error, only bad design -- when people struggle with a product, look for the missing signifier, the broken mapping, or the gulf between what they want to do and what the interface lets them do. Built around affordances, signifiers, constraints, feedback, and conceptual models, it's the book that put terms like 'affordance' and 'user experience' (which Norman coined) into everyday use, and it applies as cleanly to a door handle as to a checkout flow.

Best used for

  • —Diagnosing why users keep making the same 'mistake' in a flow
  • —Auditing a form or control for missing signifiers and unclear affordances
  • —Writing error messages that explain what happened and how to recover, without blaming the user

“After reading this you will never look at any man-made object the same. You will question everything from doors to tea kettles to the most sophisticated computer program.”

— David, Goodreads

Install this skill

Run this command in your terminal. The skill will be available in all your Claude Code projects.

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/design-everyday-things && curl -fsSL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wondelai/skills/main/design-everyday-things/SKILL.md" -o ~/.claude/skills/design-everyday-things/SKILL.md

Once installed, invoke with /design-everyday-things in Claude Code, or let Claude load it automatically when relevant.

Skill by wondelai/skills, licensed MIT.