• The best ideas tend to emerge when the whole organisational ecosystem—not just its designers and engineers and certainly not just management – has room to experiment. Empowering employees to seize opportunities when and where they see them and giving them the tools to create unscripted experiences is an essential element of that transformation.

• The obvious counterpart to an attitude of experimentation is a climate of optimism. At the most challenging times it is important to remind yourself that a successful prototype is not one that works flawlessly; it is one that teaches you something—about the objectives, the process, and yourself.

For design thinkers, behaviours are never right or wrong, but they are always meaningful. They can provide us with invaluable clues about individuals’ range of unmet needs. We step into the shoes on anthropologist to observe and watch what people do and don’t do, what they do and don’t say, and how they interact with the environment around them. Though design thinkers have an inherent attitude of experimentation, they also remaining open to accepting and working within constraints, with these constraints best visualised in terms of three overlapping criteria for successful ideas:

• Feasibility (what is functionally possible within the foreseeable future);

• Viability (what is likely to become part of a sustainable business model); and

• Desirability (what makes sense to people and for people).

Design teams will cycle back through all three considerations throughout the life of a project, building bridges of insight through empathy; the effort to see the world through the eyes of others, understand the world through their experiences, and feel the world through their emotions. This level of “emotional understanding”  forces them to keep people at the centre of the idea, preventing them from getting lost in mechanical or aesthetic details. Some Key Points

• Staffing a project with people from diverse backgrounds and a multiplicity of disciplines is imperative to effective design thinking. It involves the identification of individuals who are confident enough of their expertise that they are willing to go beyond it. The trick is to do this without sucking the life out of the creative process – to balance management’s legitimate requirement for stability, efficiency, and predictability with the design thinker’s need for spontaneity, serendipity, and experimentation.

• Dedicated spaces for working on design problems is a good way to provide a resource for longer-term thinking and ensure that the effort will be sustained.

• Design challenges are not only a great way to unleash the power of competition, they also create stories around an idea, transforming people from passive onlookers into engaged participants.

• To design an interaction and to “convert need into demand” is to allow a story to unfold over time. This realisation has led interaction designers to experiment with the use of narrative techniques such as storyboards and scenarios borrowed from other fields of design.

In short‚ design thinking converts need into demand. It′s a human−centered approach to problem solving that helps people and organizations become more innovative and more creative. The next generation of designers will need to be as comfortable in the boardroom as they are in the studio or the shop, and they will need to begin looking at every problem – from adult illiteracy to global warming – as a design problem. They will need to “embrace the mess” and allow complexity to exist (at least as they search for solutions), because complexity is the most reliable source of creative opportunities.

• Research Trips: copying is a guaranteed path to mediocrity. Originality and authenticity stems from knowing the subject and the setting inside out. Research trips and human design thinking is imperative to excellence.

• Power of Limits: Imposed limits can in certain situations simply impede progress and remove flexibility and decision making authority from individuals. Structured flexibility is key.

• Short experiments are an inexpensive way to screw up. Mistakes should be welcomed (that is how we grow and develop).

• Learning to see: It is important to actively work to see things as they are and not what things are supposed to look like in our mental model of the world. You can learn to set aside preconceptions (think about the drawing workshop analogy).

• Post-mortems: it is important to consolidate what’s been learned, teach others who weren’t there, don’t let resentments fester, use the schedule to force reflection and pay it forward.

• Notes Day: Real and meaningful engagement is powerful. Solutions to problems or issues that haven’t even been realised will be offered up willingly. If an activity such as this is to undertaken, it needs to have full buy in from the top and a commitment to act upon the input. The tone set is critical.

In the final chapter, Catmull brilliantly discusses some of the core maxims he has come to use as the basis of his management style. Each “nugget” of  advice is of course context dependent, and may not apply under certain circumstances, but if you are interested in creating a challenging, supportive and intellectually driven business, it’ll be difficult to come across a more down-to-earth, honest and concise guide to developing and leading a good business (in the sense that every employee wakes in the morning excited and grateful for who they are working with and the problems that they are working on solving).

• Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better.

• Always try to hire people who are smarter than you (even if they are a potential threat).

• There are many reasons why people aren’t candid with one another in a work environment. Your job is to search for these reasons and then address them. Ask for people to “help you understand..”.

• If someone disagrees with you, there is a reason. Your first job is to understand the reasoning behind their conclusions and to address those issues first.

• Activities such as the Braintrust meetings or Notes Day, reinforce the idea that it is okay to express yourself (even when you are critical of a business decision) and to engage in improving how the company does what it does.

• If there is more truth in the hallways than in meetings, you have a problem.

• Sharing problems is an act of inclusion. Employees will respect this candour and respect.

• The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them.

• Failure is a necessary consequence of doing something new.

• Show work early and often.

• Engaging with exceptionally hard problems forces us to think differently.

• Norman’s seven stages begin by us forming our goal (1), followed by a plan of what action we are going to take (2) and what the action sequence will be (3). We then perform the action (4) and interpret the consequence of our action through the state of the world post-action (5). In order for us to continue, we need to interpret this perception (6) in order to compare the outcome to our initial goal (7).

• The first thing we need to do when we’re introduced to a new physical object, is to determine our relationship with it. Norman refers to this as the affordance, and gives us the example of a chair, which affords (“is for”) support and, therefore, affords sitting. Next is the signifier, which communicates where the action should take place. Good communication of the purpose, structure, and operation of the device to the people who use it, is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition of good design. Whereas affordances may be perceivable, signifiers must be, else they fail to function.

• The next concept we are introduced to is mapping, which covers the layout of control and design. Following this, Norman discusses our conceptual models (for objects), and how different people may hold different mental models for the same item. As we cannot talk to the designer, we rely upon whatever information is available to us, and the combined information available to us is the system image. Designers expect the user’s model to be identical to the design model, but because designers cannot communicate directly with users, the entire burden of communication is on the system image and for user feedback to be effective, it must be immediate. Poor feedback can actually be worse than no feedback. It needs to be planned and prioritised, so that unimportant information is presented in an unobtrusive fashion (but important information is presented in a way that does capture attention).

• Norman positions conceptual models are a form of story,  resulting from our predisposition to find and have explanations (to assign cause and effect to things we do and more importantly don’t do). Stories resonate with our experiences and provide examples of new instances. This is lacking in the healthcare industry though. Patients do not have an appropriate conceptual model to interpret and communicate medical information to their physician or to elicit the appropriate facts when making a decision about their health. We need to develop a way for patients to tell stories to themselves about their health; a type of narrative medicine.

• An excellent point Norman makes is that we have a tendency to blame ourselves when we cannot use an everyday item (especially if others are able to use it). Suppose the fault really lies in the device/process/system, so that lots of people have the same problems. Because everyone perceives the fault to be his or her own, nobody wants to admit to having trouble. This creates a “conspiracy of silence”, where feelings of guilt and helplessness among people are kept hidden. The phenomenon called “learned helplessness” might explain the self-blame. This refers to the situation in which we experience repeated failure at a task, and as a result of this repeated failure, we decide that the task cannot be done (at least not by us) and we stop trying.

• As such, Norman advise designers to remember not to blame people when they fail to use their products properly; to take peoples difficulties as signifiers of where the product can be improved; to eliminate all error messages and provide help and guidance; and to make it possible to correct problems directly from the help and guidance (to not impede any attempt to progress). This is followed by  the seven fundamental principles of design which Norman has developed, refined and tested over many decades:

1. Discoverability: it is possible to discover what actions are possible and the current state of the device.
2. Feedback: there is full and continuous information about the results of actions and the current state of the product of service.
3. Conceptual Model: the design projects all of the information needed to create a good conceptual model of the system, leading to understanding and a feeling of control.
4. Affordances: the proper affordances exist to make the desired action possible.
5. Signifiers: effective use of signifiers ensures discoverability and the the feedback is well communicated and timely.
6. Mappings: the relationship between the controls and their actions follows the principles of good mapping, enhanced as much as possible through spatial layout and temporal contiguity.
7. Constraints: providing physical, logical, semantic, and cultural constraints guides actions and eases interpretation.

• Good design requires that we treat all failures in the same way. That we systematically and rigorously conduct root cause analysis (asking why until the ultimate fundamental cause of the activity is reached) to find the fundamental causes of the failure, enabling us to redesign the system so that these can no longer lead to problems. It is not possible to eliminate human error if we think about it as a personal failure and a sign of poor design of procedures or equipment. Though people are sometimes at fault, we cannot justify the attitude that presumes that this is always the case (that WE are the the problem).

• Reporting error is often made difficult by social pressures in the workplace (we do not want to admit that we, or others, made a mistake for fear of punishment, being litigated against, etc.). We need to make it easier to report errors, for the goal is not to punish, but to determine how it occurred and change things so that it does not occur again. We can’t eliminate errors until we know what they are. What we need to do is to reframe error as an opportunity to learn and develop; to improve things for others going forward.

• In the closing pages, Norman discusses something that is of extreme relevance in our ever more technologically integrated and enabled world; that almost no equipment today is designed to support the numerous interruptions that so many situations entail (receiving a call or a text message while in a meeting, someone “desk-dropping” by your cubicle, getting a snapchat notification when you’re entertaining friends, etc.). This is the greatest challenge design faces. Nudging users to fully engage and focus on the activity at hand while they are bombarded with distractions and the lure of quick rewards and gratification.

• Good solutions begin, end and are based on the individual, and how they engage with the world. Human centred design is simply essential and Norman delves into one particular approach to emphasise its importance. The “double diamond model of design” starts by questioning the problem, then expanding the scope of it, diverging to examine all the fundamental issues that underlie it. We should then hope to converge upon a single problem statement. During the solution phase, we should expand our space of possible solutions, enabling a divergent phase, before we converge upon a proposed solution.

• A simple but powerful tip that Norman concludes with, is that procedures should be designed so that the initial steps are as dissimilar as possible. If they are, the processes steps are much more salient to us and we (the user) will have a much greater likelihood to follow the designer’s intended steps.

• This book is much more than a guide to good design. It is a treatise of how we should, and need to, think about how we solve our societal problems. Designing with end user in mind, quickly and effectively eliciting user feedback, and conducting rigorous root-cause analysis are but three simple ways in which we can truly understand the problem at hand and what needs to change, and be redesigned to solve the issue.

• Obligers: They meet outer expectations but struggle to meet inner expectations. They’re motivated by external accountability
• Rebels: They resist all expectations, outer and inner.

Knowing our tendency helps us to frame our habit in a compelling way. The happiest people Gretchen finds are those who have found a way to exploit their own tendencies in the formation of the habit.

• Sometimes it might be easier to abstain than to limit yourself. It prevents poor self-control from running wild.
• Mindful exceptions of habits are permissible.
• Wait fifteen minutes – the urges or cravings will often subside.
• Identity exerts a powerful force over our habits.
• Associate with people who are likely to improve you.