The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
Published 2013 · 104,330 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Psychology, Nonfiction, Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Design of Everyday Things to read?
The Design of Everyday Things scores 27 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 33 out of 100
- Norman writes plain conversational English and defines each term he coins, such as affordance, signifier and feedforward. Technical words like proprioceptive or semiotics appear rarely. It sits near Beach Read in accessibility, slightly above because of the psychology vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Sentences are short and direct, with frequent rhetorical questions and fragments ("Nothing."). Bulleted lists and tables break up the text, so no nested clause structures demand work.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- Abstract ideas like conceptual models and the action cycle are anchored in doors, stoves, thermostats and refrigerators. That makes it concrete like Atomic Habits, with a bit more cognitive theory.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Each chapter delivers several named frameworks plus studies, anecdotes and figures, such as the coin-recall study, Lord on oral epic, and Wegner's transactive memory. The pace is comfortable and examples repeat the main points, keeping it near Atomic Habits.
How The Design of Everyday Things is regarded
The Design of Everyday Things holds a literary regard score of 73 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.