Design of Everyday Things

So I finally got around to reading The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald A. Norman (I think I was first pointed to it by Jakob Nielsen). It's a bit outdated and the writing's not so great (he belabors his points), but he does lay out some basics of what makes for good design from a user's point of view.

His seven principles are:

1. use knowledge in the world and in the head
2. simply structure of tasks
3. make things visible
4. good mapping
5. exploit power of constraints
6. design for error
7. when all else fails, standardize

The point I found most interesting comes at the end when he is discussing information technologies: "... imagine what it will be like when trying to find something in the libraries and data bases of the world, where the organization was done by someone else who had no idea of what my needs were. Chaos. Sheer chaos."

Keep in mind this was 20 years ago, but remember what it was like to find stuff on the internet before search engines (particularly google) came along? Search engines, tagging and folksonomies are not something that Norman (and most of the rest of us) could have conceived of back then!