![User Friendly](https://assets.literal.club/2/ckg95yzts10698gmx26v54herk.jpg?size=600)
User Friendly How the Hidden Rules of Design are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play
Reviews
![Photo of PG Gonni](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clqtk8qm600cv0hz20ze41sop.jpg?size=100)
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.
![Photo of Karolina](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clgykdfq5008h0iy9gcqc9z8k.jpg?size=100)
I havenβt 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.
![Photo of Ali Angco](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clrtx7304034u0iwtfljb9cqu.jpg?size=100)
See my thoughts by adding me on thestorygraph.com
![Photo of Suat Karakusoglu](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/claz7dnxn01z40i4khvrv49xd.jpg?size=100)
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.
![Photo of Fatih Arslan](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/cl653oi4w000s0huefvtggrbo.jpeg?size=100)
I loved it. Little did I know it was full of eye-opening stories. Even though Iβm not a professional designer, I learned a lot on what design means, especially from a userβs perspective.
![Photo of Dave Perkins](https://assets.literal.club/user/fallback-avatars/avatar_14.jpg?size=100)
Required UX reading. So freakinβ 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 ππ»
![Photo of Raf](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clwgo5l5c01b50i2xgrnphbd6.jpg?size=100)
When your friends or family ask what you really do as a designer, this is the book to give to them.
![Photo of Lisa Charlotte Rost](https://assets.literal.club/user/fallback-avatars/avatar_15.jpg?size=100)
3.5 stars. Read for a book club. It had some really good parts, some really good information, and wasn't as clichΓ©d 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).
![Photo of Richard Bruskowski](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clfmwywet00290j04chof78a0.jpg?size=100)
![Photo of Bhanu Pratap](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clt1mekgh004v0i367h8k0mc5.jpg?size=100)
![Photo of Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/cl6qk9h85002b0ivs65eicyym.jpeg?size=100)
![Photo of Joylyn yang](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clegnrlje04qf0i4k4ls6a4ow.jpg?size=100)
![Photo of Ericson Luciano](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/cl6oysdoj00150iwb53y0d94h.jpeg?size=100)
![Photo of Miriam Isaac](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/cl6qgk4an001c0ivsaeur9cg1.jpeg?size=100)
![Photo of Aris Acoba](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/cks8w4f02000h0hst4ety66zj.jpeg?size=100)
![Photo of Irem topcuoglu](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/cktjiq01j001m0hv6448xg4ta.jpeg?size=100)
![Photo of Udit Desai](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/cl06pn9vv00110ix49qhi4o3d.jpeg?size=100)
![Photo of Sara StevanoviΔ](https://assets.literal.club/user/fallback-avatars/avatar_13.jpg?size=100)
![Photo of Mark](https://assets.literal.club/user/fallback-avatars/avatar_17.jpg?size=100)
![Photo of Michael Ernst](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clqb461qs006e0iwt2t1q8smo.jpg?size=100)
![Photo of John](https://assets.literal.club/user/fallback-avatars/avatar_21.jpg?size=100)
![Photo of Jake Dragash](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/cll8b5n9v01wo0iy039zcgpgl.jpg?size=100)
![Photo of Taya Reznichenko](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clkzdu6ak01jf0iy9cj6bam22.jpg?size=100)
![Photo of Erik Wallace](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clkjp400w01d80iy9foojhg87.jpg?size=100)
Highlights
![Photo of Karolina](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clgykdfq5008h0iy9gcqc9z8k.jpg?size=100)
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.
![Photo of Karolina](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clgykdfq5008h0iy9gcqc9z8k.jpg?size=100)
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.
![Photo of Karolina](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clgykdfq5008h0iy9gcqc9z8k.jpg?size=100)
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.
![Photo of Karolina](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clgykdfq5008h0iy9gcqc9z8k.jpg?size=100)
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.
![Photo of Karolina](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clgykdfq5008h0iy9gcqc9z8k.jpg?size=100)
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.
![Photo of Karolina](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clgykdfq5008h0iy9gcqc9z8k.jpg?size=100)
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.
![Photo of Karolina](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clgykdfq5008h0iy9gcqc9z8k.jpg?size=100)
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.
![Photo of Karolina](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clgykdfq5008h0iy9gcqc9z8k.jpg?size=100)
Design thinking, "user-centered design," and user experience are all forms of industrialized empathy.
![Photo of Karolina](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clgykdfq5008h0iy9gcqc9z8k.jpg?size=100)
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.
![Photo of Karolina](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clgykdfq5008h0iy9gcqc9z8k.jpg?size=100)
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.
![Photo of Karolina](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clgykdfq5008h0iy9gcqc9z8k.jpg?size=100)
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.
![Photo of Karolina](https://assets.literal.club/user/avatar/clgykdfq5008h0iy9gcqc9z8k.jpg?size=100)
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.
![Photo of Stan Govorukhin](https://assets.literal.club/user/fallback-avatars/avatar_13.jpg?size=100)
Norbert Wiener discovered in his pioneering work designing fe back algorithms for shooting down German bombers, feedback is what turns information into action.