Hello everyone And welcome to the switch statement podcast It's a podcast for investigations into miscellaneous tech topics
This is episode 14 in our series on the design of everyday things by Don Norman.
Matt:Hey John. How are you doing?
Jon:Hey, Matt, I am doing? well. How are you?
Matt:I'm ready. I'm ready to wrap.
Jon:ready to be
Matt:it all up. Wrap it up in a ti in a tiny bow. No, I, you know, I enjoyed my time here. It's like when you're at a vacation, at the end of a vacation, you're like, This vacation was just long enough, but if it went any longer, I would start to hate it,
Jon:Oh, yeah. Or when guests are staying over. That's a big one for me. It's
Matt:try to tell you about their doorknobs.
Jon:Oh, man. Can you imagine having Don Norman hanging out with you
Matt:Dude, I would welcome him with open arms for a very
Jon:Brief.
Matt:amount of time.
Jon:Yeah, you would just complain about your light switches. Like what is the mapping in this apartment?
Matt:Yeah. And, uh, he probably would not be too pleased with the outcome.
Jon:Yeah, certainly for my apartment, where the mapping makes zero sense. I think I complained about this in another episode. My apartment has the most absurd lighting system.
Matt:Yeah. You also live in, what was it like he used to keep like carriages? Uh,
Jon:yeah, the Wells Fargo building used to be like
raw:a mail
Jon:center.
Matt:Ooh, pretty cool. Um, but we're not ta here to talk about mail. We're here to give our, uh, give a distillation, if you will, a distillation of our thoughts about, uh, about the, not the art of game design, sorry,
Jon:design of everyday things. by
Matt:About the de design of everyday things by Don Norman. Um, and we kind of, I think the, the, our general strategy here is we have these three questions that the idea is, we'll answer it about every book we read.
Jon:Yes.
Matt:those questions are how, oh, excuse me. So those questions are who would get the most value out of this book?
Jon:Mmm.
Matt:much impact did this book have on you? Yeah. And did the author achieve his or her or their goal with writing this book?
Jon:Wow. Those questions are very interesting for this book, um, do you want to take a stab at that first question?
Matt:Yeah. So how, uh, who would get the most value? Yeah. That it's a, this is a, this is a really, this is a hard one.
Jon:It's a broad book, yeah, like the book isn't, it's not even just design focused, there's a lot of like, philosophy, and sort of like, it's like a reference manual, you know, so it's
Matt:I, that's what I was just about to ask you. Where do you think this book falls on the spectrum of a textbook to something that anyone might just read for, or just like a fluff, like a novel, like a dime dinosaur novel.
Jon:You know, I used to hate, or hate, hate's a strong word, but I used to dislike, Defining taxonomies, sort of like coming up with a vocabulary to talk about something because I used to believe like, you know, just talk about it. Like, don't sit around faffing, like coming up with words to describe certain things, which is basically what this book is doing. I mean, this book is taking a bunch of things that were probably true in the industry for decades and Don Norman sort of created a vocabulary and a framework to talk about those things and think about those things. And it's not just design. I mean, we've seen a ton of parallels with what he's talking about and our industry, software engineering, obviously there's a lot of design and software engineering. So, you know, some of the parallels are just from that. Um, but in any case I've, I have since come around, I think it's extremely important to define, you know, taxonomies and vocabulary to talk about things. And that's a, that's basically what he's doing for design as a concept. So I, I find it very valuable and I think that a lot of different people could, could derive value from this.
Matt:Yeah, I, uh, I think that he, you know, I, he does design the or, or he, well, he doesn't design, he lays out these taxonomies. In a way, I almost think it can be like, more annoying once you know the taxonomies, because you see all of these people who, who are misusing them. It's like, now I cannot. Here, people use the word affordance because my Don Norman senses start to tingle. I'm like, you mean signifier? Use it. Use it. Right. Um, but, but no, I think, um, I would, I would recommend this to anyone who is attempting to solve open-ended problems. You know, I think that's really the spirit of design is you have something where it's not. Like you just have someone coming to you and being like, I really wish I could do X, Y, Z. But it's like they're not saying what they, they're not saying, I wish I had this widget. Or maybe actually as we talked about, maybe they are saying like, I wish I had a faster horse. And then I think what this book does is it lays out a series of exercises and frameworks for thinking about things that allow you to. More efficiently, maybe get at the heart of what the user is actually looking for and actually solve their underlying problem.
Jon:Right. And another interesting angle too, I agree with you. I think this book would be valuable for people who are actively solving things. But I also think you can be an industry professional. Who is good at solving things, which, you know, I would argue that's sort of what we are, and we hadn't read this book yet, but what this book gave us was sort of this vocabulary to now talk about these things with precision. So, you know, for instance, if I am trying to communicate a design idea that I have to my teammates at work. I've actually used some of these, this terminology that was introduced in this book. Like I have actually said affordance in design papers that I've like put towards my teammates and It's sort of like in the past I would have probably said the same thing, but I would have probably used more words and it would have been a little bit ambiguous. Now I'm saying like the exact word to mean what I say. And if, if my teammates look up the word affordance, they see exactly what it means. It, it just offers me a way to speak with like absolute precision about design, which I think is really valuable, especially in a, like a collaborative environment.
Matt:It's funny because as much as, yeah, I like, I think communicating with precision is one big positive outcome of reading this book. But it, it's also, it also guides the way that you are thinking about things. You know? It, it allows you to think in structured ways, which I think is super beneficial too. You know, I, I think about, man, I feel like we bring up AI every single time, but, uh, it's kind of like, it's like we are the AI and Don Norman is like prompting us to do a chain of thought. You know, to, to illustrate our chain of thought and like what we've seen is in AI is when you ask an AI to spell out its steps, like they, they're better at doing whatever task you provide to them.
Jon:Right.
Matt:I think this book is kind of like that for humans, you know, it's like, oh, well, you know, before you go to solve that problem, maybe think about doing this, doing, you know, like thinking about it this way.
Jon:Right. Yeah. it offers kind of this systemic approach to thinking about things where even, you know, even if you were good at it in the past. It sort of crystallizes all those little things that you were doing instinctually because you learn, you know, you intuited it over time and experience, it sort of systematizes those things, which I do think is really valuable. Another thing, like as you were talking, I just realized and I don't know if this is an issue for everyone, but I think it also offers this like confidence in, in people, like if they have been doing design for a long time and they sort of come to realize things. Instinctually, but they haven't had a way. you know, they've doubted themselves because everyone doubts themselves this book, you know, actually defines things. And it's a it's a Don Norman. He's been around for 80 billion years, and he's talked about these things over decades. And, you know, folks generally have adhered to his ideology about this. Uh, and I think that Yeah. like if you've had some of these things in the back of your mind, but have struggled to put them into words like I have, it's sort of this slight confidence boost of like, oh Yeah. that is a thing, you know, like that's, that's something I've thought about before, but like never, you know, never been able to voice it or, or put It into like words on paper to communicate it to my team.
Matt:It is funny. I agree with what you were saying about confidence. I feel like I have all of these opinions about, I've arrived at a bunch of these opinions over my career. And it's always reassuring when I come into new, some new context and people arrive at similar conclusions to me. You know, it's like, okay, this, it seems like I'm getting at this core truth here. Or at least other smart people seem to have arrived at the same conclusion here. So, um, and I think that's exactly to your point about the book. It kind of does that. It's kind of like a hyper, uh, intense version of that, about a bunch of different domains.
Jon:totally. Exactly. Exactly. And I think the Jesse shell book. Sort of did the same thing, Um, which is why, and this is all to say that, like, even if you've been in the industry for a long time, and you're sort of looking at a book like this thinking, Oh, you know, that's a book I would read in college when I'm learning about these things, you know, that's not totally true. I think there's also value in reading it, even if you are sort of an established industry professional.
Matt:One thing I would say is I don't know that someone who wasn't working in like a problem solving space, like I think it might be maybe a little bit hard to. Tie back to anything in a way. Like, I think at first I was like, oh, like anyone should read this. And I did show it to my girlfriend. And not to say that she's not solving complex problems, but I think it was, it was kind of a far jump for her and I don't know that, I think it would've been like a big chore. And I'm not sure that in the kind of works that she does, um, that it would be that useful for her. Um, so I'm not sure that like, this is just like anyone should read this and they would get a lot out of it.
Jon:Yeah, that's really fair. I think that's probably true. I, you know, I think there is probably some, cross pollination as with anything, you know, like I read a lot of physics books, for instance, uh, and it's not like I can apply random, uh, what's his name? Brian Green, I think, or Sean Carroll, or, um, I'm reading a book by a woman named, I think her name is Hofstetter right now. Anyway, it's not like I can apply these deep physics ideas that I barely understand to like my day to day software engineering work. But I feel like occasionally I will get these high level concepts that have some tie crossover and It, like reinforces certain high level ideas. And so, yeah, I would never, I would never tell someone like not to read certain books cause you know, maybe your industry doesn't put this notion up on a pedestal like ours does, but there's, there might still be some value, I guess.
Matt:It, it's interesting. I, I actually just recently I was at, there's a, there's kind of like a free book. Depository that just like sits near my girlfriend's apartment and I found a book about legal reasoning and writing and I've been reading through it and it's like, I'm not a lawyer, but it, it's interesting because you kind of learn a lot about how does, how should you be constructing an argument. It's like, you know, this is, and I, I do feel like as I've been going through this, I've been noticing things about my writing. I think it's been getting stronger because I feel like a lot of things that make legal writing persuasive, like, you need to do that in engineering or in any job, you know, when you wanna try to convince someone of something. Um, so I guess to that end, you're probably right that everyone could probably find some sort of cross pollination,
Jon:Right. Yeah. Which is, which I feel is kind of a silly, point for me to make, cause it's like, of course, like this but going back to the law thing, like, I feel like we have discussed before that law is just programming, but it's sort of like humans. It's programming where you're, the primitives you're dealing with are like, human beings essentially, which I find
Matt:It, it is literally programming where it's just like you have these. A series of logical values where it's like, okay, did you know if all of these things are true and none of these other things are true? Then X, Y, Z and it, and it's funny be because you, in going through all this, I felt very at home with a lot of these things where I feel like if someone has never taken programming, it might be feel very strange to be like, oh, like you need to break these, Tests into these, their component parts, and it just felt very like, okay, yeah, it's, but it, but you're, you have to do it in English and it's very like, that's why legal is legal. English is basically a completely different language because they're trying to use it in this precise way.
Jon:Yeah. it's a programming language.
Matt:Yeah.
Jon:As you're, uh,
Matt:programming language.
Jon:as you're reading the book, you should write the software that will do laws. You know, execute laws. Because I think, I don't know, like, I have all these ridiculous notions about the future, but I believe that in the future, robots will take care of our legal system. And they will do an absolutely perfect job.
Matt:Hmm. Interesting, interesting. Yeah. Well, I mean, so much of law is not to go dive too deep into the law rabbit hole here, but so much of law is, uh, Judging when there's incomplete information, right? Like, you know, what does, what, what can people say? Like what have people said and what hard facts have they produced and what does that allude to? And then like, what does, so there's like these many, many steps of like,
Jon:Yeah. What random precedent from like Mississippi in 1913, can I use to apply to this completely different situation?
Matt:Yeah, yeah. yeah. So, all right, well, let's get back, let's get back to the questions. Uh, so the second question is, and why don't you lead this one off? How much impact, I think we alluded to this a little bit, how much impact did this book have on you and the rest of your life?
Jon:Yeah, this, I really liked this question for this book, uh, because as I mentioned, like I've been around in, in the software industry for a super long time and, you know, I think I'm like a slightly above average engineer and I've developed. good intuition about engineering over my many, many years in the industry. And I found myself not learning a lot of new information from this book, but really crystallizing instincts that I've developed over time, which I think is very valuable, where you just have this weird nebulous belief in your head that you don't even really know that you have. And so, and someone comes to you and like, says the perfect words to describe your own belief. And I think, and I feel like I'm attributing, a huge amount of credit to Don Norman right now, and maybe he deserves it. But I found that happening a few times in this book where I was like, I didn't even know that I believed that, but like, it's one of my core beliefs about design. And,
Matt:This has been silently guiding how I've been making decisions about things, even though I couldn't have even told you that that was why I was doing
Jon:Exactly. Exactly. Which gaining this ability to now communicate that idea to other people is, is great. I mean, it's super empowering and like, I. feel Like it will enable me to just let my team know what I'm, what I'm thinking basically, which has been a struggle for me. I, like, I think this is one of those practitioner versus, um, teacher.
Matt:teacher.
Jon:Yeah. Things where, For sure. You know, a practitioner just gets really good at doing things and a teacher gets really good at explaining things. Um, and it's hard to bridge that gap sometimes. Uh, and I have definitely
Matt:In both directions, right? It's like, you know, there's, there's things that each side has a better handle on, you know, and I think there's value in.
Jon:Right. And in. a collaborative environment, it's often those people who can do both that really excel. And I think the reason they can do both is because they learn vocabularies to describe these core notions that they have. And it's never something I focused on cause I'm just super obsessed with programming and like, I don't want to talk about it, but after reading these past few books, like I am, I'm slowly, you know, after all these years, I'm slowly gaining this vocabulary to kind of talk about what I do. And, uh, it's pretty satisfying. Mm hmm. Yeah.
Matt:I think that is something that I, when I meet a person, you know, you're always doing these assessments. Like, I don't know, maybe this sounds like weird and calculating, uh, but it's like, You arrive at a judgment of how competent do you think this this person is? And one subtle thing that I think is worth a lot, at least in my estimation, is when people are very precise about the terms that they use. And I think that this book sup support, and this is specifically in design, in a design context, but. This book allows you to use all of these terms that you've probably heard before, affordance, for example, uh, just much more precisely and, uh, and yeah, I think that, yeah, if I'm, if I'm gonna try to segue that into my answer to how this has affected me, I do think, you know, I feel like every book you read. Is this kind of incremental new series of, uh, you know, training input into your neural network. And I think this has kind of nudged my neural network in kind of a more precise direction for a bunch of these mental frameworks and terms around design.
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. And I love that point because what I see a lot of. Really, really good engineers struggle with is communicating their ideas widely where you can talk to a really, really good engineer and you can be like, okay, this person, you know, she really knows what she's talking about. Um, like she has her idea, her ducks in a row, but unless she can sort of write the design. that she can send to like 50 people, you know, she has to disseminate her information via these, like. Coffee conversations, and that's just not efficient at the end of the day. It's not scalable. So to your point, like having this precise language where you can unambiguously state your ideas about design or about engineering, it's a superpower in a collaborative environment, especially, the larger the organization is, the more of a superpower it is. So it's, yeah, and I, like, that's not to say the design of everyday things will give you all the vocabulary you need. Like you, you're going to need to read a lot of books in order to gain, this vocabulary. But I did think this book had a lot of it. It put a lot of it into words that are, that are useful.
Matt:It is interesting. I wanna kind of talk to a point that you just said, which was that, You don't wanna have to like have a coffee conversation with everybody who needs to read your design because that won't scale. And I agree with that point, but I received a bit of feedback very early in my career that has stuck with me, which is like when you're working on a design, you write up the first draft and then very early on just get someone in and talk to them about it and, and review them with it. And then come to an agreement, incorporate their ideas, and, and then the super powerful, and then do that again. You know, maybe with one other person, you show it to someone else, you get their input. And this is, this is a superpower, I think, because first off, you teach them what your design's all about, so they understand it, but then also they become a defender of your idea. Right, because they are now emotionally invested in your idea because, you know, you've incorporated their ideas, you've, you know, you've, uh, accommodated their feedback. And then, so now it's like, oh, they think that this is a good idea. And then you don't have to be the only person who is answering comments on the doc. You know, they might have a little bit of bandwidth to, to explain why something is the way that it is. And I think that that is a very, very powerful, and you don't need to do it with a ton of people, like two people is probably fine. Um, or you know, I guess it depends, but, uh, but yeah, I think that, that there's something to be said for that approach.
Jon:absolutely. Yeah. It's something that's happened to me so many times. I will have this idea that I just think is really powerful and a really good idea and it kind of becomes my own personal religion, but you quickly realize that no one else adheres to that religion. Like you, you need to do a little bit of proselytizing and I think, just, it's part of being collaborative to understand that and to like kind of loop people in and convince people of your, of your stuff. And part of that is being able to speak precisely. So books like these are, are some value to that, to learning how to speak precisely.
Matt:All right. Should we switch to the last question.
Jon:Let's do it.
Matt:Did the author achieve his goals? Don Norman, what did, what did Don Norman set out to do when he wrote this book?
Jon:That is a great question. Uh, would you like to take a stab at that one?
Matt:I will, I will, I think it's my turn to start.
Jon:Nice.
Matt:I think he was a lonely old man and really wanted
Jon:Really wanted to. vent about doorknobs.
Matt:No, no. Um, this, that's the last time we will, uh, besmirch, uh, Don
Jon:We love you, Don Norman.
Matt:We love you. Don't sue us. Well, first off, the, the, he wrote the first book like 25 years before the second book. It was in like the late eighties. Right. I'm like kind of coming in from the side using alternative evidence as to whether or not he accomplish his goal, but like presumably if he didn't think that the first book was doing what he. Thought it should do. Um, he, he would've written another version of it sooner. You know what I mean?
Jon:Mm hmm.
Matt:but I think that's not really the spirit of this question. like, again, like I think there's kind of alignment and themes here where Don Norman, he experiences a bunch of different design. Processes and design systems and different companies works with a bunch of different designers and engineers and what have you,
Jon:Yeah,
Matt:and he sees an opportunity to clarify misunderstandings, create these structured systems for what he sees as the right way to do design. And I think to that end, I think he did a really good job.
Jon:yeah, no, I, I agree. And I think like, and I'm really glad you brought up the whole release date of this book. You said it was the eighties
Matt:Let
raw:the
Matt:let me check that. Yeah.
Jon:Um, cause that, that. almost makes it more insane because you look at the, the progression of, you know, humanity or whatever, like 88? Okay. Yeah. So, which is, man, 88. So long ago. I was, I was four years old and Don Norman is laying down knowledge. Uh, but in any case, Yeah. the direction I was headed is like the act of problem solving has become an absolutely core value to, to the current human race. You know, we've, we've gone far past the point of like. You know, feeding ourselves and being able to talk to each other quickly with high bandwidth, we're now at a point where we're sort of optimizing, you know, every aspect of our existence, and that just involves endless problem solving and certain things have sort of unlocked, uh, more ability to problem solve. I think programming itself was sort of you know, what the Industrial Revolution was, to fabricating things, programming was to problem solving. And I, I feel like I'm sounding a little bit like a broken record, but being able to communicate about problem solving and having a framework around problem solving is just incredibly valuable to performing the act and. And, you know, I think that is what Don Norman set out to do. I think he saw this as like, this is a thing human beings are doing. We're designing things, we're sort of optimizing all of these day to day tasks that we're performing in these day to day items that we're interacting with. Uh, and I think he sort of saw a gap where there wasn't this ability to talk about it and there wasn't this, you know, crystal clear set of terms that we can use. Um, and so I think that was, that was his goal is to sort of put that out there into the world. And, uh, I think he did a good job. I think, uh, it's obviously withstood the test of time. Like this is still a book that people refer to. It's a book you'll read in college if you're going to become a designer. Um, and, and it's provided a ton of value to me. And it's, it's insane to me that he wrote it in 88. because it almost seems kind of prescient in a way. Um. Because I think it's just as important today, if not more so, uh, than it was back then.
Matt:Well just to imagine a design book that stays relevant through. The internet age and like this was after the iPhone came out and it's like, yeah, all of these lessons were remaining mostly correct and valuable throughout all of that. And I mean, that's when you know you've got something at the core that it's no matter what your technology is, these are all lessons that you're still going to be applying.
Jon:Exactly. Yeah.
Matt:you know, we're doing vr, that's actually orthogonal.
Jon:Oh, totally. Yeah. And like, I, I think there was a few points in the book where he mentioned like, it was almost like he was predicting this, like the LLMs, you know, where now like having a full team of people who specialize in individual things may not be as important in the near future. Cause we can sort of task LLMs with, with solving these problems. Like I felt like there was a few points in the book where he was kind of predicting those things. So I think he's good at seeing these trends I think it's a testament to, to how long he has been in the design world and how much he has thought about these things, because I think it gets easier to predict, uh, where your industry is going to go. Uh, the longer you've been in there and the longer you've, you know, been able to develop these instincts.
Thanks for listening!
Matt:If there's one criticism I would level at the book, it seems like what happens is he has an interesting tidbit of information that doesn't, or it's not clear necessarily how it ties to the rest of the chapter.
Jon:Yeah.
Matt:Like I think sometimes he's pigeonholing interesting stories, which, you know, they are amusing and interesting. But I'm, it's not always obvious as a reader what the takeaway is in the context of the chapter that it's placed within.
Jon:Yeah.
Matt:you know, there was the one about sound. He talked about how like, cars don't make any noise anymore. And that was, I forget which chapter that was in, but it was kind of like unclear how that related to anything else in the, in the chapter. And maybe that's just my problem. Cause I didn't, I couldn't understand what. The point of that was,
Jon:Yeah. No, no, I, I definitely agree with you. Well, I, I think that, you know, the, the material always had some relation, but the relation was tenuous where I, you know, I think he's just been around the block and he's, he's encountered a lot of very interesting Situations, and he probably just wants to talk about them. So he sort of, you know, picks the chapter that most matches up with, you know, his experience at the NTSB or whatever, and just sort of injects in one of those experiences. And I think I agree with you that sometimes it was sort of like, why are you talking about this? Uh, but, but at the same time, I am a very concrete thinker. It's like difficult for me to just speak entirely in abstractions. Uh, and I like that he sort of had these concrete examples, but they were sometimes a little far afield.
Matt:Yeah. Um, uh, one, one thing I think could be interesting, like if we were gonna make a suggestion to how he organized the book, I was thinking back to refactoring by Barton Fowler. I. Um, man, I guess we always like throw a bunch of shade on, on uh, the authors. Although I guess Jess, we were pretty, we were pretty kind to Jesse shell,
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. Just, I think Jesse Schell writes in a very humble way, whereas I, I, and I don't know, maybe I'm just making this up, but I felt like Don Norman was a little authoritative and it's easy to like, Just be critical of someone who's being authoritative, even if they're right.
Matt:Yeah. Yeah. It's like you don't know that you're saying that with more authority than I think you have.
Jon:yeah. I think I have. this natural skepticism of anyone who's speaking with any authority cause I'm just so familiar with like con men or people who are like, I think a super common thing in our industry is that someone will do their best to speak with 100% authority. Because they know that any weakness in their argument will just immediately be exploited, which is actually a, it's a criticism of the people who exploit those minor weaknesses and in people's arguments. But anyway, I've sort of seen this weird, you know, personality that engineers have to develop over time where they're just like, try to be incredibly impervious to like any weakness or any vulnerability.
Matt:not, I am not a fan of that approach.
Jon:Yeah, yeah.
Matt:getting back to the point I was making before about refactoring, he had a section which was basically a catalog. And I almost wonder if it might not have been an as effective a, uh, like a way to organize the book because it's like you get to the catalog and you're like, all right, I'm just gonna ski over this, whatever. Like I might read one or two, whatever. Um, so. Maybe that's why he did it the way he did. But I almost feel like he could have these catalog of stories and then he could have references out, out to them. And it's, each story is gonna tie in a little bit to every other chapter. He could have a little blurb about a design scenario or some
Jon:Like a concept.
Matt:with. Yeah. Some or a problem and like a story. Yeah. A concept. And then he could, and he'd say like, oh, well if you want the full story read, go to the, uh, the catalog. And so I think that. That could have made the sections feel a little bit less like, oh my gosh, he needs to get, do so much background here that feels like it's taking me far into the weeds.
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Like this book had, it seemed to be fighting with itself as to whether it was like a prose sort of interesting novel versus reference material. And I think the realization Martin Fowler had was people who are reading this book are programmers. Like they know what programming is. They've, they've probably been doing it for, you know, a little while, maybe they're in college, but they still have some strong background in it. So presenting his material as basically a bullet pointed list made perfect sense because everyone was already primed to receive it in that way. Um, and I think Don Norman, uh, just maybe, maybe he didn't have that same luxury where maybe he thought that people might be coming from it. Like less receptive to that sort of way of dispensing information. But I certainly would've preferred it dispensed in that way, uh, because I felt like I sort of had to read around a lot of like prose and stuff in order to get to the heart of the matter.
Matt:Yeah.
Jon:Um, and Yeah, I think I'm just saying the same thing that, that you were saying, but it I definitely got that same, uh, impression.
Matt:I think that's really well put though. I think it, it, it's maybe like a frustration where we want this like terse technical summary. I. And then there's actually a lot of stuff around it that is making it harder to get this detailed technical description.
Jon:Right. Exactly. Yeah.
Matt:It's a question of how they're expecting the books to be used. I think Martin Fowler really expected people to have this on their desk and be like, oh, like. Refused bequest, you know? Uh,
Jon:Dude, refused bequest is definitely the best term in that book, except maybe shotgun surgery, which is my, my other favorite.
Matt:Yeah.
Thanks for listening!
Matt:So I think, I think that's everything. We don't do a summary. There's no scoring. You know, I don't think. Right. We don't. Seven, seven. Not out of anything. Yeah, this, you know what's, you know what I take umbrage with? People change the top number of like a rating system, but they never change the bottom number. Right? It's like, I think this book was like a 60 on a scale from like 50 to 79.
Jon:that is
Matt:That's actually not a very good
Jon:What's weird. Yeah, that would be a terrible, uh, system not to, I mean,
Matt:Wow. Okay. That's
Jon:your, but no, what I was about to say is it's so funny you mentioned this because just the other day I was trying to figure out if. I think it was Google Play Stores, uh, star ratings started from zero or one. Like I was trying, like, can you say
Matt:I don't think it's possible. No, I don't think so. I think to give a raving, I think you have to give one.
Jon:Cause that's kind of crazy. Like, because basically, well, I don't know, maybe it's not, maybe it's not. I mean, this Is how my brain works, but I sort of, I think I was always operating under the assumption that zero was possible. Cause I've like literally never rated anything. So when I see a rating of like, you know, three, it's, it's like higher to me than if zero wasn't possible. Does that make sense?
Matt:It does, right? Because if, if someone can give a score of zero three is better. Right? I mean, because it, it changes where it is, you know, proportionally on the
Jon:Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.
Matt:But that would make my eye twitch, because that would mean that three was not in the middle. Right. It would be like 2.5, is the middle of zero to five, right?
Jon:it's just weird that you can't go below one. Like, what if something is so bad? Like, it doesn't deserve any stars if it's really bad, right? A star is
Matt:a pretty good thing. Like even one star, it's like, dude, like all of Earth only has one star.
Jon:Yeah, if on my deathbed, someone is like one star, I'll be like, all right, not, you know, could, could have been better, but not too bad.
Matt:Wow. Okay. Yeah, I would, well, I, I would probably be, what is it out of? This is a, this is one star out of a rating from, uh, negative 50 stars to one star.
Jon:Yeah, exactly. We're changing that lower number.
Matt:I, yes, we change the lower number. This is, this is what we're saying. Go out there. Make a rating system that has a lower number, that's not one or zero or negative one if you want to do that kind of normalization. I guess
Jon:Yeah. No, negative one. Good, good number.
Matt:I, you know what, I think that's a pr, that's a pretty good balance of something that's like just completely unusable, but also like a little bit quirky. Like we would rate and rank our books from negative one to one.
Jon:Yeah.
Matt:I think that actually more, I think that's a better rating system than one to five, frankly.
Jon:I agree. I agree. Cause you can multiply it by things and it's sort of stable, you know.
Matt:Exactly. Exactly. Um, so what would you give this on a scale from negative one to one?
Jon:You know, as much as I made fun of Don Norman, uh, in a loving way, I thought this book was really, really good. I. really liked it. Uh, it certainly had flaws, but I think I would rate it pretty highly. I think I would give it like a 8.
Matt:Nice. That's pretty good. I would agree. I mean, I think it was very readable for all of, the stuff we were saying about how like you had to wade through a bunch of these. Old man stories. there was no no point where I was like, oh, this is really, like, difficult to understand what he's saying. Um, which I think is like, that's, I mean, that's I guess just table stakes for a book, but, um, I feel like a lot of books don't meet that either,
Jon:Oh, yeah, absolutely. And also he's talking about fairly tough material. So the fact that he was able to... Describe it in a way that made sense to, to people is great.
Matt:I would give it a 0.85.
Jon:Ah, man, now he's going to like you more than me, but that's
Matt:don't think he's gonna like either of us at all.
Jon:Yeah, he has no, no idea we exist. Um, but we know he exists.
Matt:true. Facts with John Badard
Jon:All right. Anyway,
Matt:I don't want to make any claims about what we're gonna do in our next episode, because who knows
Jon:who knows? Could be anything. Stay
Matt:because last time we just lied, we lied to all of our listeners ears
Jon:Yeah. Sorry, listeners.
Matt:Well, we're not gonna do that now. We've seen the error of our ways.
Jon:Right.
Matt:All right. See you next time, John.
Jon:See you,
raw:Matt.