Pushing Yourself to Constantly Achieve: Efforts without Setbacks Mean You Haven't Aimed High Enough
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In the latest issue of the prestigious Journal of Financial Economics, Don Norman, the co-founder and Principal Emeritus of Nielsen Norman Group, is advocating for a shift in design thinking. The article, found on pages 18-32 of Volume 96, Issue 1, encourages current and future generations of designers to embrace a human-centric approach to tackle complex societal issues.
Norman argues that many design failures occur due to a lack of focus on usability, intuitiveness, and understanding how people think and behave. He uses the example of "Norman doors" - a confusing design that causes frustration and friction - to illustrate this point.
According to Norman, designers can learn from failure by deeply engaging with human-centered design approaches. He emphasises the importance of solving the right problem, harnessing people-centered design, taking small, incremental steps, and using systems thinking to understand delayed effects, feedback loops, and the broader impact on interconnected systems.
Norman encourages designers to learn fast and learn frequently, breaking big challenges into smaller ones to learn from and build on. This iterative approach allows designers to develop usable, humane, and context-aware innovations that can address major societal issues sustainably.
Interestingly, David Kelley, the founder of design firm IDEO, once said, "Fail faster, succeed sooner." This sentiment aligns with Norman's perspective, as he believes that failure is a way to learn in design. Just like a great skateboard trick or ski jump, every successful design is the direct result of hundreds of prior attempts.
The Interaction Design Foundation holds the copyright for the images used in this article under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.
In summary, Don Norman's perspective teaches us that failure in design often comes from ignoring human factors. Learning from failure means embracing human-centered design, systems thinking, and incremental approaches. By doing so, designers can move beyond merely creating usable products to addressing significant societal challenges in a practical and scalable way. This approach contrasts with quick, large-scale fixes, advocating a grounded, pragmatic, and humane path toward solving complex problems.
In the realm of education-and-self-development, learning about ui design and interaction design can equip designers with the tools needed to create usable, humane, and context-aware innovations, adhering to Norman's principles of human-centered design. Technology, being the backbone of these design disciplines, can help designers learn faster and more frequently, emulating the iterative approach Norman advocates.
