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.
npx skills add wondelai/skills/design-everyday-things --global 
The Design of Everyday Things Don Norman View on Amazon
02 What it is
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.
03 Key concepts
Five principles your agent applies.
Drawn from The Design of Everyday Things — not advice it repeats back to you, but decisions it makes while it works.
04 Fit
When to use it, and
when not to.
four symptoms it fixes, and four it doesn't.
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.
05 Prompts
Say it like this.
Name the skill at the end of a prompt and the agent applies the framework rather than a vibe. Or say nothing — it loads on its own when a task matches.
Audit this interface for missing affordances and signifiers using design-everyday-things skill
Improve the feedback loops in my checkout process using design-everyday-things skill
Redesign these controls to use natural mapping using design-everyday-things skill
Help users build a correct mental model of our pricing tiers using design-everyday-things skill
06 About the author
07 Same stack
The stack it sits in.
Nine Design & UX skills. Most people run two: this one, and whichever fits the next problem.
All Design & UX skills08 Questions
Before you install.
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.
09 Guides that use it
Put it to work.
Long-form playbooks where this skill does part of the job.
One skill, one command.
Install Design of Everyday Things, or the whole stack.
npx skills add wondelai/skills/design-everyday-things --global MIT licensed · Claude, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes · No account