Donald A. Norman wrote the seminal book on design, Design of Everyday Things. In this book, the author has covered all common uses - Tech gadgets, household appliances, doors, cars, etc.

Highlights from the book:
Chapter 1. The Psychopathology of Everyday Things
Visibility is one of the most important principles of design. The designer must provide signals that naturally indicate where to push.
Excessive visibility, however, is a detriment to usability, for it interfers with the mapping between intended actions and actual operations.
Just the right things have to be visible; to indicate what parts operate and how....

It’s the job of the design to make everything obvious.
Designers should adhere to "natural design." If a door is intended to be pushed...
A “push” sign on a door is, for all intents and purposes a manual. When something is designed correctly you know intuitively what to do and how to use it without having to think about it or worse, guess, or worst of all, ask someone to explain it to you.
What looks or feels like user error is actually a design error. In other words, you’re not an idiot or mechanically inept because you can’t figure out how to program the VCR.

The 4 most important design for error principles:
1.Understand the causes of error and design to minimize those causes.
2. Make it possible to reverse actions - to "undo" them - or to make it harder to do what cannot be reversed.
3. Make it easier to discover the errors that do occur, and make them easier to correct.
4. Change the attitude toward errors. Think of an object's user as attempting to do a task, getting there by imperfect approximations. Don't think of the user as making errors; think of the actions as approximations of what is desired.

The seven UCD (User Centered Design) principles for transforming difficult tasks into easy ones:
1. Use both knowledge in the world and in the head.
2. Simplify the structure of tasks.
3. Make things visible.
4. Get the mappings right.
5. Exploit the powers of constraints-Natural & Artificial.
6. Design for Error.
7. When all else fails, standardize.

Other Chapters in the book:

Chapter 2. The Psychology of Everyday Actions
Chapter 3. Knowledge in the Head and in the World
Chapter 4. Knowing What to Do
Chapter 5. To Err Is Human
Chapter 6. The Design Challenge
Chapter 7. User-Centered Design

[From the Great Books Series. Also see The Success Manual  - Encyclopedia of Advice, which contains summaries of 100+ Most useful books.]