Design of Everyday Things
Foundational design principles: affordances, signifiers, feedback
Apply Don Norman's foundational design principles — affordances, signifiers, mapping, and feedback — to digital products. This skill equips your AI agent with a conceptual framework that makes interfaces intuitive and error-resistant.
The Design of Everyday Things
npx skills add wondelai/skills/design-everyday-things --global This skill is compatible with Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, and other agentskills.io-compatible agents.
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.
Example prompts for the Design of Everyday Things skill
Audit this interface for missing affordances and signifiers using design-everyday-things skill
Design reviewImprove the feedback loops in my checkout process using design-everyday-things skill
UX improvementRedesign these controls to use natural mapping using design-everyday-things skill
Interaction designHelp users build a correct mental model of our pricing tiers using design-everyday-things skill
Information designDesign of Everyday Things vs the other Design & UX skills
All 9 Design & UX skills are free and install the same way — the only question is which framework fits the job in front of you.
| Skill | Based on | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Refactoring UI | Refactoring UI — Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger | Practical UI design system |
| iOS HIG Design | Human Interface Guidelines — Apple | Native iOS app design guidelines |
| UX Heuristics | Don’t Make Me Think — Steve Krug & Jakob Nielsen | Usability evaluation and principles |
| Web Typography | On Web Typography — Jason Santa Maria | Web typography principles and implementation |
| Design of Everyday Things | The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman | Foundational design principles: affordances, signifiers, feedback |
| Top Design | Elite Agency Techniques — Locomotive, Studio Freight, AREA 17 | Award-winning 10/10 web design |
| Lean UX | Lean UX — Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden | Collaborative, experiment-driven UX design |
| Microinteractions | Microinteractions — Dan Saffer | Designing details that delight users |
| Steve Jobs Design Review | Steve Jobs — Walter Isaacson | Jobs-style reviews: ruthless simplicity, focus, binary verdicts |
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.
Guides that use this skill
Install Design of Everyday Things
Free, open-source, and ready in 30 seconds.
npx skills add wondelai/skills/design-everyday-things --global MIT Licensed · Works with Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent & other agentskills.io agents · No account needed
Don’t guess your AI engineering level.
Measure it.
AI Developer Scorecard
How production-grade is your AI engineering?
Twenty-five questions across the practices that separate vibe-coding from production-grade engineering. Instant score, per-section breakdown, and a 30/60/90-day playbook.
Score 0–75 · 30/60/90-day playbook Score yourself For CTOs & foundersCTO Scorecard
Is your engineering team ready for AI at scale?
Twenty-five questions on how your org adopts AI — adoption, governance, automation, and ROI. See where you sit on the path from Reactive to Strategic Leader.
Score 0–75 · Reactive → Strategic Leader Score your orgWe build the skills you already use. Now we’ll build yours.
Sprints from $3K · shipped to production, or you don’t pay the final milestone.