Don Norman's jnd website

• Change of status. After nine enjoyable years, I'm retiring from Northwestern University. I'll be busier than ever, but this will let me do more consulting, travel more, stay longer, and be more spontaneous. So I'll be busier than ever, but on my own schedule: I already have activities scheduled throughout the rest of 2010 and into 2011.
• Core77. I've begun to write a column for the Design Website, Core77. These columns will be relatively short and aimed at a wide audience. I start with "Design thinking: A useful Myth."
  

Welcome to jnd.org:
Welcome to jnd.org: jnd = just noticeable difference, a technical term in the field of psychophysics. See What is jnd? This website is the home for my essays, chapters from my books, book reviews, and other miscellany.

I spend my time with the Nielsen Norman group consulting for industry to produce enjoyable and effective products and services, serving on company board of directors and advisory boards, and writing and publishing. I spend two months each year as a "Visiting Distinguished Professor of Industrial Design" at KAIST, in Daejeon, South Korea.

Living with Complexity: to be published October, 2010 (MIT Press)

Table of Contents, Cover Photo, and Chapters:

The world and our activities are inherently complex, so our tools must match that complexity. Complexity is necessary: it is confusion and unnecessary complication that should be eliminated. This book is an argument in favor of properly designed complexity, against the simple-minded notion that things should be simple. Simplicity is in the mind. We need complexity, but accompanied by understanding. Simplicity is in the mind: When we understand something, it is simple. When we don't, it is complicated.

Understanding defeats complexity. To most of us, the cockpit of a commercial airline is a confusing jumble of dials and controls. To the expert, the cockpit is comforting, familiar, and understandable. Knowledge makes the difference.

See my essays Sociable Design, Psychology of Waiting Lines, Simplicity Is Not the Answer
Norman, D. A. (2010, September). Living with Complexity. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press.
(MIT Press also published my Invisible Computer as well as the UK edition of Design of Everyday Things.)

Other Books
Translations of my published books keep appearing. The Japanese translation of "Living with Complexity" has started, with the same team who have done my previous books. A Portuguese (Editora Rocco, Brazil) translation of "Emotional Design" is out as are Japanese and Taiwanese translations of "Design of Future Things." I've seen Korean and Chinese editions of "Design of Future Things." Translations in Brazil, Italy, Korea, and Spain are underway. The Greek translation of "Design of Everyday Things" is complete, which will make it the twelfth country to publish it. A Persian translation (for Iran) is in the works.

Company Advising:
I am not permitted to name all of my clients, but but here are a few:

reQall
I am officially empowered as "Chief Mentor" of reQall (and now I'm becoming a board member). Call reQall from any phone and speak whatever you want to remember. It then shows up in your email as text, as a voice message, and on a website. Even automatically on your calendar. We worked hard to make it really simple, to eliminate all the features that came to mind. No features, therefore no fuss. Simple and powerful. Developed by a team, some of whom worked with me at Apple. Neat. It is also a teamwork tool. Free. It works smoothly with Evernote, to increase the power of both (read the CNet discussion).

reQall is also an active memory assistant, using time or your location to remind you. Read all about it in a review by David Pogue in the New York Times.

Evolution Robotics's Mint
An automatic floor cleaner (for hard floors only: think of it as a robotic Swiffer). I'm an adviser to Evolution Robotics: Mint is their latest, cool release. See the You-Tube Video. And here is the website.

Schedule

To schedule me for talks, interviews, or consulting, see my Speakers Bureau under Press Kit (where you will also find biographical sketches and photographs).

My Physical Location (except for talks listed below):

• July 21, 2010. Living with Complexity. Keynote address, Higher Education Web Symposium. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
  
• July 2010 - September 7, 2010: Palo Alto, CA (Silicon Valley).
• September 8, 2010 - November 11, 2010: KAIST, Daejeon, S. Korea.
• November 11 - 14, 2010. User Friendly 2010 Conference, Nanjing
• November 15 - 17, 2010 (approx.) Shanghai
• November 17 - 22 (approx). Hong Kong.
• November 22 - 25, 2010. Taiwan (Taipei and Tainan?)
• Nov 26, 2010: Palo Alto, California
• Week of December 13, 2010: Delft, the Netherlands
• January 23, 2011. TEI 11 (Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction). Funchal, Portugal (Madeira).
  
• May 11, 2011. Keynote, User experience, Lisbon (UX-Li). Lisbon, Portugal
• September 5 - 9, 2011. INTERACT 2011. (Honorary Chair). Lisbon, Portugal.
  

• July 21, 2010. Higher Education Web Symposium. Keynote. The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
• October 4 - 7, 2010. Design and Emotion Society Conference, Chicago, Illinois. (I do not have any role in the conference beyond serving on the advisory board.)
• November 12-14, 2010. Keynote.  User Friendly 2010, Conference. Nanjing, China. 
• July 11 - 15, 2011. INTERACT conference on HCI. Lisbon, Portugal.

Recent Book Reviews

(the complete set is in "Recommended readings.")

Design-driven innovation: changing the rules of competition by radically innovating what things mean

The more you believe that human-centered design is important, the more you need to read this book. "Want to be radical? Forget user-centered innovation." Hmm, sounds like something I would say, but in this case it isn't me, it is Roberto Verganti, author of "Design-driven innovation." Verganti argues for a forgotten dimension in products: meaning. The traditional view is technology driven, with most innovation being small, incremental changes and occasional large, dramatic jumps. I have argued that human-centered design is useful for incremental changes, but not for the large, radical transformations (Norman, 2010). Verganti agrees, but adds a critically important new dimension to the argument: meaning.

Two Books on Technology: "The Nature of Technology" & "Technology Matters"

Technology is important to all of us, and it is critical to understand the role it plays in society. Society, culture, human behavior and technology lay a complex intertwined role together, each mutually influencing the other, so the evolution of each is affected by the evolution of the others.

The Lie Detectors

Many scientists and tinkerers are driven to discover a machine that will tell us when someone is lying. Unfortunately, many have claimed success, sufficiently so that the machine called a "lie detector" is in common use in police stations, government agencies, and even by some company employment agencies. The lack of scientific evidence for their accuracy is irrelevant. How does this happen? The story is a fascinating one: Ken Alder, a historian of science at Northwestern University tells it wonderfully. Highly recommended.

Recent Essays

(The complete set is in "Essays.") (Updated June 28, 2010)

Design Thinking: A Useful Myth

A powerful myth has arisen upon the land, a myth that permeates business, academia, and government. It is pervasive and persuasive. But although it is relatively harmless, it is false. The myth? That designers possess some mystical, creative thought process that places them above all others in their skills at creative, groundbreaking thought. This myth is nonsense, but like all myths, it has a certain ring of plausibility although lacking any evidence. Why should we perpetuate such nonsensical, erroneous thinking?...

GESTURAL INTERFACES: A STEP BACKWARDS IN USABILITY

Gestural interfaces are fun to use: gestures add a welcome feeling of activity to the otherwise joyless ones of pointing and clicking. The are truly a revolutionary mode of interaction. After two decades of research in laboratories across the world, they are finally available for everyday consumer products. But the lack of consistency, inability to discover operations, coupled with the ease of accidentally triggering actions from which there is no recovery threatens the viability of these systems. We urgently need to return to our basics, developing usability guidelines for these systems that are based upon solid principles of interaction design, not on the whims of the company human interface guidelines and arbitrary ideas of developers.

Talk: Research Practice Gap & 2 Kinds of innovation

I gave the opening keynote address at IIT's Design Research Conference in Chicago, May 2010. In it, i combined two of the major themes I have long been working on. The video of that talk is now available. The research-product gap. The design research community -- and all research communities, for that matter -- have little understanding, knowledge of, or even interest in the product side of companies. Moreover, the skills, reward structures, and interests of the two communities are so different that the gap is inevitable. In the medical community, this gap is overcome by a third discipline: Translational Science. I recommend we follow suite with a new discipline, Translational Engineering, that translates the language of research into the language of products, and vice-versa. Two kinds of innovation. A very closely related confusion exists about innovation. Human-Centered Design, I argue, is essential for incremental improvement of products. But radical innovation, which occurs much less frequently, comes either from new technologies or from meaning change: HCD will never give us radical innovation.

The Research-Practice Gap

There is an immense gap between research and practice. There are fundamental differences in the knowledge and skill sets required by those who conduct the research and those who attempt to translate those results into practical, reliable, and affordable form. Between research and practice a new, third discipline must be inserted, one that can translate between the abstractions of research and the practicalities of practice. We need a discipline of translational development. Translational developers are needed who can mine the insights of researchers and hone them into practical, reliable and useful results. Similarly translational developers must help translate the problems and concerns of practice into the clear, need-based statements that can drive researchers to develop new insights. Neither direction of translation is easy.

Natural User Interfaces Are Not Natural

Gestural interaction is the new excitement in the halls of industry. Advances in the size, power, and cost of microprocessors, memory, cameras, and other sensing devices now make it possible to control by wipes and flicks, hand gestures, and body movements. A new world of interaction is here: The rulebooks and guidelines are being rewritten, or at least, such is the claim. And the new interactions even have a new marketing name: natural, as in "Natural User Interface." As usual, marketing rhetoric is ahead of reality. All new technologies have their proper place. All new technologies will take a while for us to figure out the best manner of interaction as well as the standardization that removes one source of potential confusion. None of these systems is inherently more natural than the others. What we think of as natural is, to a large extent, learned.

This Website

This website was selected for inclusion in the National Science Digital Library Report for Math, Engineering, and Technology. August, 2002

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