# Design of Everyday Things > Foundational design principles: affordances, signifiers, feedback — an AI agent skill based on *The Design of Everyday Things* by Don Norman. Published 2026-02-19 · Updated 2026-08-17 · Design & UX · Free and MIT-licensed Canonical: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/design-everyday-things/ Source: https://github.com/wondelai/skills/tree/main/design-everyday-things **Install:** `npx skills add wondelai/skills/design-everyday-things --global` ## What is the Design of Everyday Things skill? Don Norman gave the field its vocabulary — affordance, signifier, mapping, feedback — and the Design of Everyday Things skill puts that vocabulary to work on software. Your agent uses it to explain why a control fails: what it invites you to do, what it signals, whether its layout matches what it affects, and what it tells you afterwards. ## Key concepts from The Design of Everyday Things your agent applies - **Affordances** — Design elements that naturally suggest how they should be used — buttons look pressable, sliders look draggable. - **Signifiers** — Provide visual or auditory cues that communicate where and how to interact with an interface. - **Natural Mapping** — Arrange controls so their spatial layout corresponds to the layout of the things they affect. - **Feedback Loops** — Give immediate, informative feedback for every user action to confirm what happened. - **Conceptual Models** — Help users build accurate mental models of how the system works through clear design. ## When to use Design of Everyday Things — and when not to Reach for it when: - Users click the wrong control repeatedly and nobody on the team can articulate why. - An action succeeds silently, so people do it twice, unsure the first one worked. - You are designing a control with no real-world analogue and need a first-principles argument for its form. - Your team keeps calling it user error for a mistake the interface makes easy to commit. Reach for something else when: - You need a scored audit to hand a team on Friday — UX Heuristics produces one; this produces reasoning. - The interface is understood and simply needs visual craft — Refactoring UI is the faster route. - You want the feedback specced in detail — Microinteractions defines trigger, rules, feedback, and loops. - You are deciding what to build rather than how it should behave — Jobs to Be Done gets at the job. ## About Don Norman Father of user-centered design, former VP at Apple. Don Norman is the father of user-centered design who coined the term "UX." He co-founded Nielsen Norman Group and served as VP of Apple's Advanced Technology Group. More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Norman · https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q92804 The book: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25726927M/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things · https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things · https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7729821 ## Example prompts - Audit this interface for missing affordances and signifiers using design-everyday-things skill _(Design review)_ - Improve the feedback loops in my checkout process using design-everyday-things skill _(UX improvement)_ - Redesign these controls to use natural mapping using design-everyday-things skill _(Interaction design)_ - Help users build a correct mental model of our pricing tiers using design-everyday-things skill _(Information design)_ ## Frequently asked questions ### How do I install the Design of Everyday Things skill? Run `npx skills add wondelai/skills/design-everyday-things --global`. It takes about 30 seconds and needs no account. The Design of Everyday Things skill then works in Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw and Hermes Agent — anything that reads the open agentskills.io format — and your agent loads it on its own when a task calls for it. It is free and MIT-licensed, and the source is at https://github.com/wondelai/skills. ### Which book is the Design of Everyday Things skill based on? It packages *The Design of Everyday Things* by Don Norman — father of user-centered design, former VP at Apple. The skill distils the book's method into instructions your agent follows while it works, covering affordances, signifiers and natural mapping. It sits in the Design & UX part of the library. ### The book is about doors and stoves. Does it transfer to software? That is exactly why it transfers. Norman derived the principles from objects with no manual and no onboarding, which is the condition every screen is in for a first-time user. The skill does the translation for you: affordance becomes hit area and interactive styling, mapping becomes whether the control order matches the thing it controls, feedback becomes what appears in the 200ms after a tap. Norman revised the book for the digital era himself. ### How does it relate to the UX Heuristics skill? They come from the same lineage — Norman and Nielsen founded the same consultancy — and they operate at different levels. Nielsen’s heuristics are a compressed, checkable form of principles Norman argued from first principles. This skill is the one to reach for when you need to explain a failure or defend a design decision rather than count violations, and when the interaction is novel enough that no checklist item quite covers it. ### What does it actually say about errors? That most of them are design failures with a predictable shape. It separates slips — you knew what to do and your hands did something else — from mistakes, where your mental model of the system was wrong; the fixes differ completely. Slips want forcing functions, constraints, and generous undo. Mistakes want a clearer conceptual model. The skill also pushes undo over confirmation dialogs, since people dismiss the dialog and then need the undo anyway. ### Will it tell me which UI pattern to use? Rarely, and that is a real limitation. Norman gives you a lens for evaluating whatever you propose, not a component library — it will tell you that your multi-step flow leaves users unable to evaluate the result, but it will not hand you the stepper pattern that fixes it. For prescription, pair it with iOS HIG Design on Apple platforms or Refactoring UI on the web. ## Related - All Design & UX skills: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/design/ - Refactoring UI: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/refactoring-ui/ - iOS HIG Design: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/ios-hig-design/ - UX Heuristics: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/ux-heuristics/ - Web Typography: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/web-typography/ - Top Design: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/top-design/ - Lean UX: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/lean-ux/ - Microinteractions: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/microinteractions/ - Steve Jobs Design Review: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/steve-jobs-design-review/