Cliff Kuang

Robert Fabricant

AMAZON BEST BOOKS OF 2019 PICK FORTUNE WRITERS AND EDITORS' RECOMMENDED BOOKS OF 2019 PICK 'A tour de force, an engrossing fusion of scholarly research, professional experience and revelations from intrepid firsthand reporting' -- New York Times USER FRIENDLY is a must-read for anyone who loves well-designed products-and for the innovators aspiring to make them. It seems like magic when some new gadget seems to know what we want before we know ourselves. But why does some design feel intrinsically good, and why do some designs last forever, while others disappear? User Friendly guides readers through the hidden rules governing how design shapes our behaviour, told through fascinating stories such as what the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island reveals about the logic of the smartphone; how the pressures of the Great Depression and World War II created our faith in social progress through better product design; and how a failed vision for Disney World yielded a new paradigm for designed experience.

How the Hidden Rules of Design are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play

User Friendly

How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work and Play

Karolina

Feedback is the fundamental language of user-friendly design. But the big challenge with designing feedback is iguring out when and where to provide it.

A world of instantaneous, dead-simple interactions is also a world devoid of higher-order desires and intents that can't readily be parsed in a button. While it may become easier and easier to consume things, it will become harder and harder to express what we truly need.

Lies spread far better than truth, because a lie that we can believe in is so much easier to share than a truth that requires another click to discern.

The trick of the user-friendly world is that not only are we addicted, the drug doesn't have to be bought. The drug lies in our own brains, hardwired there by evolution.

This is the greatest open challenge in the user-friendly world: how to create one coherent face to the user, when the company behind that face is really a federation, atomized in order to make the work efficient. If the most infiuential companies in the world can't do it, you can bet that it's an open problem as to off bol how to do it. Perhaps there is a natural limit to how much people can collaborate on a shared vision.

The modern corporation wasn't designed to serve up a coherent experience. It was designed for the division of labor, to expend its energies on the efficiency of the parts rather than the shape of the whole.

It's common to hear technologists articulate that same dream of making technology so useful that it's invisible. But how will it become so? Simply by weaving itself into the social fabric that pre-ceded it; by becoming more humane. The teleology of technology's march is that it should mirror us better-that it should travel an arc of increasing humaneness.

Design thinking, "user-centered design," and user experience are all forms of industrialized empathy.

We demand that new technologies do not only what they promise, but what we imagine. We also demand that they behave in the way we guess they will, without ever having used them before. But making that happen means that the machines must be designed so that our imaginations can't get too far ahead of the machines. When they do, confusion reigns.

User-friendliness is simply the fit between the objects around us and the ways we behave. So while we might think that the user-friendly world is one of making user-friendly things, the bigger truth is that design doesn't rely on artifacts. All the nuances of designing new products can be reduced to one of two basic strategies: either finding what causes us pain and trying to eliminate it, or reinforcing what we already do with a new object that makes it so easy it becomes second nature. The truest material for making new things isn't alumninum or carbon fiber. It's behavior.

This is the spine of the user-friendly world, unchanged whether you're talking about smartphones or toothbrushes or driverless cars: a deference to the complexity of understanding people as they live.

It is a strange kind of world we live in, where to make sure that men make no mayhem with a machine, they're made to behave like a button.

Stan Govorukhin

A collection of really interesting stories about product design and its history all the way from its birth, wrapped in the least user friendly language possible. Obscure and complex vocabulary make this a more difficult read than necessary.

PG Gonni

I haven’t read a book about design in a long while and this was a great comeback. I enjoyed the stories of innovation, but even more so, the dissection of importance and challenges of user friendliness. Must read for anyone in product and design.

Ali Angco

See my thoughts by adding me on thestorygraph.com

A lot of research, plenty of insights; each chapter contains vital aspects of user experience, human and machine interactions with solid examples from planes to washing machines, telephones to nuclear plant controls. 

Suat Karakusoglu

I loved it. Little did I know it was full of eye-opening stories. Even though I’m not a professional designer, I learned a lot on what design means, especially from a user’s perspective. 

Fatih Arslan

AMAZON BEST BOOKS OF 2019 PICK FORTUNE WRITERS AND EDITORS' RECOMMENDED BOOKS OF 2019 PICK "User Friendly is a tour de force, an engrossing fusion of scholarly research, professional experience and revelations from intrepid firsthand reporting." —EDWARD TENNER, The New York Times Book Review In User Friendly, Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant reveal the untold story of a paradigm that quietly rules our modern lives: the assumption that machines should anticipate what we need. Spanning over a century of sweeping changes, from women’s rights to the Great Depression to World War II to the rise of the digital era, this book unpacks the ways in which the world has been—and continues to be—remade according to the principles of the once-obscure discipline of user-experience design. In this essential text, Kuang and Fabricant map the hidden rules of the designed world and shed light on how those rules have caused our world to change—an underappreciated but essential history that’s pieced together for the first time. Combining the expertise and insight of a leading journalist and a pioneering designer, User Friendly provides a definitive, thoughtful, and practical perspective on a topic that has rapidly gone from arcane to urgent to inescapable. In User Friendly, Kuang and Fabricant tell the whole story for the first time—and you’ll never interact with technology the same way again.

How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play

Dave Perkins

Required UX reading.
So freakin’ good.

Lots of principles that just make absolute sense when you hear them in the context of story, of how they were stumbled upon. Listened to this as an audiobook but have ordered the paper as a reference to dip back into 👏🏻

When your friends or family ask what you really do as a designer, this is the book to give to them. 

Caleb Yarian

Despite the relative newness of the practice of 'user-friendly' design, most of the writing and discussion about it has treated it as an ahistorical subject, with universal, unquestioned, and unchanging principles and practices. 

This book, intended for a general audience but satisfying for practitioners as well, is a welcome deviation from this norm. It offers a clear, insightful survey of how user experience design has been shaped by, and also helps to shape, the historical, cultural, and economic contexts within which it operates.

Kuang accomplishes all of this without ever getting bogged down in plodding technical details, or even a strictly chronological order to the narrative. Rather, he jumps deftly from era to era, never losing the reader as he deploys engaging anecdotes to introduce the major issues and perspective shifts in the field.

User experience design is full of paradox and unintended consequences. The practice supposedly exists solely for the betterment of end users, but is completely subsidized and influenced by corporate entities with profit incentives less than fully aligned with the interests of those users. It exists to make life better for people by making it simpler for them, but in doing so also creates new behaviors and needs that increase life's complexity. Much good has been done through its influence, but much harm as well.

But Kuang is not an apologist or a preacher. He raises the paradoxes without ever becoming heavy-handed or choosing sides, merely describing the reality and, in doing so, forcing the reader to consider and deal with their own complicity.

Lisa Charlotte Rost

3.5 stars. Read for a book club. It had some really good parts, some really good information, and wasn't as clichéd as I feared. That said, it also wasn't as mind-blowing as I expected it to be. I did enjoy some of the earlier chapters, and the afterword/how to by Robert Fabricant (whose role for the rest of the book is sadly still unclear to me).

User Friendly How the Hidden Rules of Design are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play

Reviews

Highlights