Textbook of Usability

b. 1935, New York City · Cognitive scientist and design theorist; popularised user-centred design

Also known as: Don Norman, D. A. Norman

Donald Arthur Norman is the figure most associated with the modern, psychologically grounded view of design. Trained as an electrical engineer at MIT and as a mathematical psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, he spent the bulk of his career at the University of California, San Diego, where he co-founded the Department of Cognitive Science.

His 1988 book The Psychology of Everyday Things, reissued in 1990 as The Design of Everyday Things, made the case that frustration with doors, light switches, taps and software is not user error but designer failure. The book gave the discipline its working vocabulary (affordances, signifiers, mappings, feedback, conceptual models, forcing functions) and established that observable usability problems can be diagnosed using the same cognitive psychology that explains perception, attention and motor control.

In the early 1990s Norman joined Apple as a User Experience Architect, a title he is widely credited with coining; the term "user experience" now denotes the full discipline that grew out of this textbook's subject matter. He later co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group with Jakob Nielsen, which continues to publish influential research on web and software usability. His later books, Emotional Design (2004) and Living with Complexity (2010), broaden the argument to cover affective response and systemic complexity.