It's a typical reaction when faced with this quote. Hell, I had that reaction at first, too: he's just dumb, and too lazy to figure out how to do things. (Though I didn't go so far as to wish him ill. That seems...petty.) The reaction seems especially common among people whose job it is to figure out complex technologies. "Why simplify things? Learning to use a new tool well is an art in itself -- and rewarding. Besides, afterward I know how to use this tool so well, I can do new cool things with it."
But there's an important distinction to be made: spending your time learning to use a tool for a task helps you do your task, and is time invested in doing your task (or new tasks) well. Time spent learning how to overcome your tool's shortcomings so it can help you do your task is time wasted: that is an extra task added on top of the thing you were already trying to do.
Ease of use is *really* hard to design. It's so hard that you rarely see it, because when it works it's invisible. (Hence his later book, "The Invisible Computer".) It's so hard that we're surrounded by counterexamples, things which mistake simplicity for usability, or resort to constraining the user's actions to ones which the designer made easy.
Norman theorized and, more importantly, explained carefully, how to design things such that they help you do what it was you were trying to do in the first place. He's not dumb; he's lazy, which is why he (e.g.) spends a tremendous amount of time working on his books so that they're understandable. I commend them to you, especially the one mentioned above...though the insights in them may seem too obvious when you read them, for the above reason!
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It's a typical reaction when faced with this quote. Hell, I had that reaction at first, too: he's just dumb, and too lazy to figure out how to do things. (Though I didn't go so far as to wish him ill. That seems...petty.) The reaction seems especially common among people whose job it is to figure out complex technologies. "Why simplify things? Learning to use a new tool well is an art in itself -- and rewarding. Besides, afterward I know how to use this tool so well, I can do new cool things with it."
But there's an important distinction to be made: spending your time learning to use a tool for a task helps you do your task, and is time invested in doing your task (or new tasks) well. Time spent learning how to overcome your tool's shortcomings so it can help you do your task is time wasted: that is an extra task added on top of the thing you were already trying to do.
Ease of use is *really* hard to design. It's so hard that you rarely see it, because when it works it's invisible. (Hence his later book, "The Invisible Computer".) It's so hard that we're surrounded by counterexamples, things which mistake simplicity for usability, or resort to constraining the user's actions to ones which the designer made easy.
Norman theorized and, more importantly, explained carefully, how to design things such that they help you do what it was you were trying to do in the first place. He's not dumb; he's lazy, which is why he (e.g.) spends a tremendous amount of time working on his books so that they're understandable. I commend them to you, especially the one mentioned above...though the insights in them may seem too obvious when you read them, for the above reason!