Donald Norman

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Donald Norman 2005
Donald Norman 2011

Donald Arthur Norman (born December 25, 1935 ) is Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego and Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University . He is considered a usability specialist and, together with Jakob Nielsen and Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, is the founder of the Nielsen Norman Group , which is mainly active in the area of ​​usability consulting. He is also an IDEO Fellow and a member of the Board of Trustees of the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago.

Norman's first books dealt with usability, with the usability of objects and later of computers. However , he also practices social criticism in books like Things That Make Us Smart , especially in the television and poor museum space . He takes great pleasure in positive products that combine design and emotions , as he explains in the book Emotional Design . Norman is believed to be the originator of the term information appliance , which was mentioned in his book The Invisible Computer .

Norman takes a controversial stance that the design research community has had little influence on product innovation and that while academics can help refine existing products, it is technologists who make the breakthroughs.

Career

Norman received his Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from MIT and his PhD in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania . He is an honorary doctorate from the Italian University of Padua .

Upon graduation, Norman accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University's Center for Cognitive Studies and became a lecturer within a year.

After four years at the Center for Cognitive Studies, Norman accepted a position as Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) . Norman applied his training as an engineer and computer scientist as well as an experimental and mathematical psychologist to the emerging discipline of cognitive science. Norman eventually became the founding chairman of the Department of Cognitive Science and chairman of the Department of Psychology.

At UCSD, Norman was one of the founders of the Institute for Cognitive Science and one of the organizers of the Cognitive Science Society (along with Roger Schank, Allan Collins, and others), which held its first meeting on the UCSD campus in 1979.

He was also vice president of the Advanced Technology Group at Apple and has worked for Hewlett-Packard . In 1991 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Awards

Norman has received many awards for his work. He received two honorary degrees, an "SV della laurea ad honorem" in psychology from the University of Padua in 1995 and a doctorate in industrial design and engineering from Delft University of Technology . In 2001 he was accepted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and won the Rigo Award from SIGDOC, the Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group (SIG) on the Design of Communication (DOC) . In 2006 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computing and Cognitive Science. In 2009, Norman was made an Honorary Fellow of the Design Research Society.

Nielsen Norman Group

In 1998, Norman founded the Nielsen Norman Group (NN / g) together with his colleague Jakob Nielsen . The company's vision is to help designers and other businesses focus on more human-centric products and Internet interactions, and is a pioneer in the area of usability .

User-centered design

In 1986, Norman first wrote about user-centered design in his book User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-computer Interaction , a book edited by him and Stephen W. Draper. The introduction to the book introduces the idea that designers should focus their efforts on the people who will be using the system:

Humans are so adaptable that they are able to shoulder the entire burden of adapting to an artifact, but skilled designers make large chunks of that burden disappear by customizing the artifact to suit users.

In his book The Design of Everyday Things , Norman uses the term " user-centered design " to describe a design based on the needs of the user, ignoring secondary issues such as aesthetics. User-centered design is about simplifying the structure of tasks and making things visible.

In his book The Things that Make Us Smart: Defending the Human Attribute in the Age of the Machine , Norman uses the term "cognitive artifacts" to describe "those artificial devices that manage, display, or work with information to provide a To fulfill the function of representation, and which influence the cognitive performance of humans ". Similar to his book The Design of Everyday Things , Norman argues in favor of developing machines that fit our minds, rather than our minds adapting to the machine.

In the revised edition of The Design of Everyday Things , Norman goes back to his earlier claims about aesthetics and eliminated the term user-centered design entirely. In the foreword of the book he says:

The first edition of the book focused on making products understandable and usable. The overall experience of a product encompasses much more than just its ease of use: aesthetics, enjoyment and fun play a crucial role. There was no discussion of pleasure, indulgence and emotion, emotion is so important that I wrote an entire book, Emotional Design , about the role it plays in design.

Instead, he currently uses the term "human-centered design" and defines it as follows: "an approach in which human needs, abilities and behaviors come first and are then designed to take those needs, abilities and behaviors into account" .

Works

psychology
  • Human information processing: An introduction to psychology , 1975, together with Peter H. Lindsay, German introduction to psychology , Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg / New York 1981, ISBN 3-540-09874-7 .
  • Memory and attention , 1977, German attention and memory , Beltz, Weinheim / Basel 1973, ISBN 3-407-28159-5 .
  • Learning and memory , 1982
Usability
  • Direct manipulation interfaces , 1985, together with EL Hutchins and JD Hollan
  • User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction , 1986, together with Stephen Draper
  • The Design of Everyday Things , 1988, originally under the title The Psychology of Everyday Things , dt. Dinge des Alltags , Campus-Verl., Frankfurt / Main 1989, ISBN 3-593-34134-4 .
  • Turn signals are the facial expressions of automobiles , 1992
  • Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine , 1993
  • The Invisible Computer , 1999
  • Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things , 2003
  • The Design of Future Things , 2007
  • Living with Complexity , 2010

Quotes

  • "Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." Academics are paid to be smart, not to be right.
  • "Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible." Good design is actually much harder to perceive than bad design, partly because good design fits our needs so well that the design is invisible.
  • "A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem." A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solving the right problem.
  • “Fail often, fail fast,” Fail often and on time.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ About Don Norman. Retrieved June 10, 2020 .
  2. ^ Technology First, Needs Last. December 5, 2009, accessed June 10, 2020 .
  3. ^ Jamie Cohen-Cole: The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature . University of Chicago Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-226-09233-1 ( google.de [accessed June 10, 2020]).
  4. ^ A b Nielsen Norman Group: World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience. Retrieved June 10, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Norman, Donald A., Draper, Stephen W .: User centered system design: new perspectives on human-computer interaction . L. Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ 1986, ISBN 0-89859-781-1 .
  6. ↑ Norman, Donald A., Draper, Stephen W .: User centered system design: new perspectives on human-computer interaction . L. Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ 1986, ISBN 0-89859-781-1 .
  7. ^ Donald A. Norman: Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine . Ed .: William Patrick Book. Basic Books, 1994, ISBN 978-0-201-62695-7 , pp. 304 pages .
  8. ^ A b Donald Norman: Things of everyday life. Good design and psychology for everyday objects . Campus Verlag GmbH, 1996, ISBN 978-3-593-34134-7 , p. 228 .
  9. ^ Donald Norman: Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things . Basic Books, 2005, ISBN 978-0-465-05136-6 , pp. 270 .
  10. ^ Annual Conference . Bureau of Economic and Business Research, Graduate School of Business, University of Utah, 1996 ( google.de [accessed June 10, 2020]).
  11. ^ Don Norman: The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition . Basic Books, 2013, ISBN 978-0-465-07299-6 ( google.de [accessed June 10, 2020]).
  12. ^ Don Norman: The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition . Basic Books, 2013, ISBN 978-0-465-07299-6 ( google.de [accessed June 10, 2020]).
  13. ^ Don Norman: The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition . Basic Books, 2013, ISBN 978-0-465-07299-6 ( google.de [accessed June 10, 2020]).
personal data
SURNAME Norman, Donald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Norman, Donald A .; Norman, Donald Arthur
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American cognitive scientist and usability specialist
DATE OF BIRTH December 25, 1935