design-everyday-things

Run a UX audit by evaluating your product interface across the Gulf of Execution and Gulf of Evaluation to surface usability gaps. The framework analyzes discoverability, affordances, signifiers, mappings, constraints, and feedback to provide actionable design improvements.

The Gulf of Execution is the gap between a user's goal and the actions available to them in an interface. Evaluating this gulf during a UX audit helps identify missing signifiers, poor mappings, or inadequate constraints that prevent users from figuring out how to use a product.

You can evaluate both digital products and physical devices. Norman's design principles apply universally to everyday interactions, allowing you to audit hardware controls and software interfaces using the same framework of affordances, signifiers, and feedback.

Affordances and signifiers improve onboarding by making interactive elements visually obvious and clearly communicating their function. Auditing these principles helps align the product's perceived properties with the user's conceptual model, reducing friction during initial use.

You need to provide YAML frontmatter metadata for the interface being analyzed. Optional references can be included to enable deeper analysis and case-study guidance during the evaluation of discoverability, feedback, and conceptual models.

Use Norman's framework when you need to diagnose foundational usability gaps related to discoverability and conceptual models rather than visual aesthetics. It is ideal for aligning teams around a shared mental model and training designers to identify execution and evaluation gulfs.