Don Norman is no slouch when it comes to design, usability/human factors, and cognitive science. He was an Apple vice president in the 1990s focusing on it, co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group to practice it, and has written multiple books to explain it.
He’s recently started to raise the temperature of his criticism of Apple’s hopefully temporary abandonment of usability/human factors and cognitive science in its software designs:
“I was once proud to be at Apple, proud of Apple’s reputation of advancing ease of use and understanding. Alas, these attributes are fast disappearing from their products in favor of pretty looks, or as designers call it ‘styling.’
“Apple has gotten carried away by the slick, minimalist appearance of their products at the expense of ease of use, understandability, and the ability to do complex operations without ever looking at the manual.”
Don Norman’s TED address, “The three ways that good design makes you happy,” February 2003.
Norman is currently writing a critique of Apple’s moves away from usability, “How Apple ruined design,” with Bruce Tognazzini, Apple’s first interface designer and partner in the Nielsen Norman Group.
Earlier this month, Norman sat for an interview with Ayesha Salim writing for IDG Connect. Norman provides a more nuanced version of his criticism when he tells Salim, that “the invention of the gesture phone and this crazy notion of minimisation and eliminating anything that might help the person has caused this deterioration.” He goes on to point out that Google has followed Apple into the usability abyss and that Microsoft is currently doing the best job in terms of usability.
According to Norman, Apple lost its way when it forgot the three most essential principles of excellent design:
- discoverability
- feedback
- correction
Authoritative, canonical source: Donald Norman says Apple has forgotten usability.
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