The Principles of Product Development Flow

In the past you may have been told that the key to economic success is efficiency…[or] conformance to plan… I would suggest that both of these popular beliefs are fundamentally wrong. The key to economic success is making good economic choices with the freshest possible information. p235, emphasis mine

The Design of Everyday Things

Good Design

In the first chapter of The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman pokes fun at bad designs. He mocks smooth, beautiful doors that give no indication of how to open them and complex office phones with more functions than buttons. But users rarely see these as failures of design. People are more prone to blame themselves for being unable to figure out how poorly designed things work.