08 Sep Designing for Everyday
In a nutshell (TL;DR)
By 2009 the user-experience profession had ballooned to hundreds of thousands, yet firms still paid dearly for ignoring its lessons—700 medical-device recalls a year and multi-million-dollar productivity leaks. Smartphones raised public expectations faster than companies could redesign legacy products, exposing a widening “tolerance gap”. Closing it demands rigorous metrics, C-suite commitment and consumer vigilance—continuing the crusade Norman began in 1988.
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Designing for Everyday By Daniel G. Rego September 8, 2009 | Washington, DC |
It has been 21 years since Donald Norman first inveighed against temperamental teapots and murderous door handles in The Psychology of Everyday Things (POET). In the intervening decades, technologists have learnt to chant “user-centered design” almost as often as marketing departments say “synergy”. Yet the battlefield still lies strewn with objects that willfully resist their users’ intentions and, in the process, bleed profits, patience and—occasionally—lives.
From sticky lids to touchscreens
If 1988’s villains were photocopiers and cookers, the late-2000s’ rogues’ gallery is dominated by software and silicon. Last year alone, the world shipped 174 million smartphones, up 15 % on 2008, turning every bus-stop into a usability laboratory. Apple’s iPhone, launched in 2007 with the evangelistic promise that “it just works”, did more than any design manifesto to make ergonomics mainstream—while also raising expectations to vertiginous heights. When things misbehave, tolerance evaporates faster than a lithium-ion battery.
When bad design kills
Modern gadgets may be pocket-sized, but the costs of getting them wrong are anything but. Nowhere is this starker than in healthcare technology. Between 2005 and 2009 American firms initiated 3,510 medical-device recalls—an average of more than 700 a year. User-interface blunders, from ambiguously labelled buttons to bewildering alarm hierarchies, remain a recurrent root cause, prompting the US Government Accountability Office to chide regulators for failing to mine recall data for systemic design faults.
The economics of empathy
Corporate finance departments, too, have begun to quantify their irritation. Jakob Nielsen’s most recent survey of 72 web-redesign case studies shows that moving an intranet from “poor” to merely “good” usability now delivers annual productivity savings of $5.4 million—down from the $14.8 million bonanza available at the turn of the millennium. Even after this slimming, spending roughly 10 % of a project’s budget on usability still yields an 83 % improvement in the website’s key metrics—hardly a shabby return for thinking before coding.
A profession comes of age
As the returns remain handsome, the supply of those qualified to reap them has surged. Nielsen reckons the global cadre of usability professionals has swelled from scarcely 1,000 souls in 1983 to roughly one fifth of a million today. At this pace—the profession has been doubling every four years—UX is shedding its reputation as the ivory tower of informatics and becoming the lingua franca of corporate strategy.
Why, then, do we still suffer? A closer look at the three structural frictions:
1. Concentration of Competence and capital distribution
Labor economics. A seasoned ethnographer in San Francisco or Copenhagen commands a salary that a Malaysian rice-cooker OEM can neither match nor amortize across razor-thin margins.
Knowledge clusters. Design schools (Parsons, SCAD, RCA, etc) and venture capital cluster geographically, reinforcing a feedback loop: talent follows money; money follows talent. Peripheral regions are locked out of that loop and must rely on commodity industrial engineers, not specialized labor.
Supply-chain myopia. Component suppliers are optimized for cost, not insight. A Shenzhen-based ODM will gladly tweak plastics tooling, but has no budget to run week-long context-of-use studies in rural Ohio.
2. Deadline tyranny and the cult of feature-parity
“Ship first, fix later.” Quarterly road-maps and analyst calls value punctuality over polish. A product that misses Christmas is, by definition, a failure; one that meets the date but confuses users can always receive a firmware patch—eventually.
Check-box competition. Buyers—especially procurement teams—compare spreadsheets, not experiences. Hence the arms race for megapixels, gigahertz and menu options that marketing can spotlight, even if each extra toggle compounds cognitive load.
Design debt accrual. Like technical debt, deferred usability work accumulates interest. Every hastily added feature increases the refactor cost and shrinks the appetite to do it. Managers, racing the Gantt chart, tacitly accept tomorrow’s churn to satisfy today’s KPI.
3. Misaligned incentives and the cost-externalization trap
Invisible P&L lines. The thirty minutes a consumer spends deciphering arcane icons on a microwave never hits the manufacturer’s income statement. Warranty budgets usually exclude “user error,” so the friction remains unpriced.
Support obscurity. Call-center costs are often booked to a separate service subsidiary or outsourced entirely, insulating product teams from the downstream pain. In many firms, the designers never see the top five help-desk tickets.
Perverse success metrics. A printer maker may celebrate razor-thin hardware margins made good by lucrative ink sales—yet those sales are inflated precisely because the UI tricks people into unnecessary cartridge swaps. The company’s scoreboard registers “revenue,” not “customer exasperation.”
Delayed brand erosion. Only when social-media outrage scales or a regulator demands a recall do the hidden costs surface. Even then, the spreadsheet focuses on the one-off fine, not on the erosion of lifetime value across thousands of customers quietly vowing never again.
Until talent, timelines and accounting methods are realigned with the end-user’s lived reality, the market will continue to tolerate—indeed, to reward—designs that are merely good enough to sell, but nowhere near good enough to delight.
How to civilize the everyday
The remedy lies in five imperatives:
1. Measure relentlessly
What it really means
Treat usability as a business variable, not a varnish. Instrument every key flow—on-boarding, checkout, maintenance—with time-to-task, success rate, error depth, NPS delta. Require the CFO to see a UX balance-scorecard at month-end, the same way she sees EBITDA and free-cash flow.
What “good” looks like
A CEO can name (and trend) the cost of a one-second slowdown in the mobile app; every product squad has a north-star metric (“<4 taps to success”, “≤2 % input errors”) tied to bonuses.
2. Expose Hidden Costs
What it really means
Call each friction what it is: an operational loss. Tally returns, help-desk minutes, training videos, field-service visits and regulatory fines as “usability provisions.” Roll them into the product P&L so the margin erosion is visible, not buried in “overheads.”
What “good” looks like
QBRs juxtapose gross margin with usability leakage. A $4-part that spawns $7 in warranty calls is declared value-negative and redesigned or retired.
3. Elevate Design to the C-Suite
What it really means
Reporting lines dictate power. A design head nested under Marketing will be asked to “add sizzle”; reporting to the CEO or COO lets them veto go-lives that flunk the usability exit-criteria. Board charters should add “Chief Experience & Trust Officer” to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the CFO.
What “good” looks like
Launch committees possess a red card that halts shipment if the ease-of-use acceptance score < 90 %. Design sign-off is as mandatory as financial sign-off.
4. Educate the market
What it really means
Bad interfaces survive only when buyers tolerate them. Arm customers with plain-language UX scores (think energy labels for appliances or crash stars for cars). Celebrate products that vanish in use and shame those that nag, crash or confuse.
What “good” looks like
Retail skews toward “friction-free certified” products; online reviews weight learnability as heavily as durability. CFOs observe that each one-star usability hit lops two points off repeat-purchase rates.
5. Instrument the wild
What it really means
Ship every connected product with opt-in telemetry that captures real usage: rage-click heat-maps, voice-assistant fallback rates, misscans on checkout. Marry that data to rapid beta-channels so fixes ship in days, not quarters.
What “good” looks like
A coffee machine flags a 12 % mis-tap rate on the “double espresso” icon within 48 hours of launch; firmware with clearer iconography rolls out before the first wave of warranty calls.
Coda for the next generation
The toddlers who wrestled with recalcitrant TV remotes in the early 1990s are now adults thumbing capacitive touchscreens with casual fluency—and they have an even lower tolerance for friction. Their children will inherit invisible interfaces: voice, gesture and anticipatory systems. By the time POET celebrates its silver jubilee, the true scandal may be not that designers ignored human needs, but that they underestimated human ambition. Norman did not fail in his crusade; he simply wrote chapter one. Chapter two belongs to the rest of us.
Keywords
user‑centered design, human‑computer interaction, cognitive ergonomics, design psychology, usability engineering, interaction design, ethnographic research, product‑market fit, design debt, feature creep, time‑to‑task, error rate, abandonment rate, net promoter score, CX metrics, design economics, cost of poor quality, recall management, regulatory compliance, FDA oversight, medical‑device safety, telemetry feedback, continuous deployment, design thinking, lean UX, agile product development, customer lifetime value, experience parity, design governance, Chief Experience Officer, frictionless interfaces, intuitive UI, consumer advocacy, market education, usability ROI, talent clustering, innovation hubs, supply‑chain constraints, spec‑sheet competition, invisible costs, support overhead, brand erosion, speed‑to‑market, first‑mover disadvantage, instrumentation, wild‑in‑use data, rage‑click analysis, heat‑map analytics
References
Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things. Originally published as The Psychology of Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 1988); reissued with the current title (New York: Doubleday/Currency, 1990).
Nielsen, Jakob. “Usability ROI Declining, But Still Strong.” Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g), 21 January 2008. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-roi-declining-but-still-strong/
Statista. “Global Shipments of Smart Connected Devices, 2009–2012.” Statista infographic, https://www.statista.com/chart/934/global-shipments-of-smart-connected-devices/
U.S. Government Accountability Office. Medical Devices: FDA Should Enhance Its Oversight of Recalls. GAO‑11‑468. Washington, DC: GAO, June 2011. https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-11-468-highlights.pdf