Written by Donald A. Norman, this book takes the obvious and throws it in your face. Norman begins the book by explaining why things are designed the way they are in our world, what the compromises are between design and usability, and just how all of this gets ignored in the 1990 world the book was written in. He follows this up with a description of our own actions, the logic behind them, and why we interpret happenings around us the way we do. After this, Norman starts what I think is the meat of the book. Donald stresses natural mappings of things like stoves and faucets, the importance of visually understanding what to do, and creating a noticeable reaction to any sort of input. Then, he goes into human error. People make mistakes, this has to be taken into account when designing something. We need to minimize error and make it as impossible to destroy what is being accomplished.
To me this book seems dated. It is 20 years old. All of the points in this book seem to be common sense and already practiced, though I expect that's because Norman wrote this book and it changed the world of design. Simple with little clutter, visual reminders and clear directions, difficult to break; this is good design. The problem comes when putting all of this into practice. We know what things should be, but making them that way takes lots of time, effort, and money.
I agree with you that this book seems a little outdated since he mentions many things that "will be made in the future" that we already have. I also think that many of design errors that he has pointed out are something that we deal with still and need to be addressed. This book picked on certain errors in detail and I agree with you that I think because of this book, many designers started to take these things into consideration before they designed something new.
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