The Intrusive Computer
The Invisible Computer:
Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex,
and Information Appliances Are the Solution
By Donald A. Norman
The MIT Press, 1999, 302pp.
$13.95
By Eugene E. Kim
Books on design seem to share a common characteristic: a general dissatisfaction with the way things are. Different authors choose to explore this premise in a variety of ways, from justifying their dissatisfaction over hundreds of pages to suggesting alternative methodologies for improving the design process. The latter is not necessarily more useful than the former. Most books on designing Web pages, for example, can be distilled into a relatively short list of aphorisms: don't put too many links on a page, minimize the size of your graphics files, and so on.
Donald Norman's The Invisible Computer isn't a book that explains how to design better Web sites, although some of the principles he describes certainly do apply. Norman has a bone to pick with the high-tech industry and its products, and he's willing to devote an entire book describing it. His complaint? Personal computers are too hard to use, and, as his title suggests, are better off unseen. Making personal computers easier to use won't work, insists Norman, because they are inherently complex. The solution is to simplify computers into more specialized devices: information appliances.
To make his case, Norman differentiates between intrusive and nonintrusive technologies. When we refer to the technology industry, we're almost always referring to intrusive technologies, technologies that force us to adapt our lifestyles, usually in undesirable ways, in order to use them.
