Design and Build Great Web APIs

Understanding Norman’s Action Lifecycle

In his 1988 book, The Design of Everyday Things,^[24] author Donald Norman lays out several principles of designing and building “things” (doorways, telephone, computers, and so on) for human interaction. A former Apple Fellow and co-founder of the human-computer interaction design firm Nielsen-Norman Group, Norman was the first to use the phrase “user experience” in a job title and is considered by many to be one of the founders of the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). He released an updated edition of his book in 2013, which continues to influence the field of computing.

One important concept in Norman’s work that can be directly applied to our work of modeling APIs is Norman’s ...