User Friendly
Compelling
Insightful
Profound

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

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.
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Reviews

Photo of PG Gonni
PG Gonni@sekei
3.5 stars
Dec 30, 2023

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.

+3
Photo of Karolina
Karolina@fox
4.5 stars
Apr 1, 2023

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.

+2
Photo of Ali Angco
Ali Angco@aliangco
4 stars
Mar 26, 2023

See my thoughts by adding me on thestorygraph.com

Photo of Suat Karakusoglu
Suat Karakusoglu@suat
4.5 stars
Mar 12, 2023

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.

+2
Photo of Fatih Arslan
Fatih Arslan@fatiharslan
4 stars
Jan 22, 2023

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.

Photo of Dave Perkins
Dave Perkins@tallyhoooooo
5 stars
Aug 16, 2022

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 πŸ‘πŸ»

Photo of Raf
Raf@raffaele
5 stars
Oct 15, 2021

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

+3
Photo of Lisa Charlotte Rost
Lisa Charlotte Rost@lisa
3 stars
Aug 12, 2021

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
Richard Bruskowski@richy
5 stars
Jul 30, 2024
Photo of Bhanu Pratap
Bhanu Pratap@bhanupratap
5 stars
Oct 23, 2023
+1
Photo of Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain
Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain@jessebc
5 stars
Aug 12, 2023
+1
Photo of Joylyn yang
Joylyn yang@joylyn
4 stars
Feb 23, 2023
Photo of Ericson Luciano
Ericson Luciano@ericsonluciano
5 stars
Jan 31, 2023
Photo of Miriam Isaac
Miriam Isaac@miriamisaac
4 stars
Aug 14, 2022
Photo of Aris Acoba
Aris Acoba@aris_acoba
3.5 stars
Apr 1, 2022
Photo of Irem topcuoglu
Irem topcuoglu@irem
3.5 stars
Mar 22, 2022
Photo of Udit Desai
Udit Desai@uydesai
3.5 stars
Mar 2, 2022
Photo of Sara Stevanovič
Sara Stevanovič@sarastevanovic
4 stars
Feb 17, 2022
+4
Photo of Mark
Mark@exort
5 stars
May 12, 2024
Photo of Michael Ernst
Michael Ernst@beingernst
4 stars
Dec 18, 2023
Photo of John
John@doubledouble
4 stars
Dec 10, 2023
Photo of Jake Dragash
Jake Dragash@jakedragash
5 stars
Aug 12, 2023
Photo of Taya Reznichenko
Taya Reznichenko@phillimore
5 stars
Aug 6, 2023
Photo of Erik Wallace
Erik Wallace@erikwallace
5 stars
Jul 26, 2023

Highlights

Photo of Karolina
Karolina@fox

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.

Page 311
Photo of Karolina
Karolina@fox

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.

Page 269
Photo of Karolina
Karolina@fox

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.

Page 262
Photo of Karolina
Karolina@fox

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.

Page 257
Photo of Karolina
Karolina@fox

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.

Page 228
Photo of Karolina
Karolina@fox

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.

Page 227
Photo of Karolina
Karolina@fox

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.

Page 196
Photo of Karolina
Karolina@fox

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

Page 163
Photo of Karolina
Karolina@fox

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.

Page 122
Photo of Karolina
Karolina@fox

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.

Page 96
Photo of Karolina
Karolina@fox

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.

Page 68
Photo of Karolina
Karolina@fox

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.

Page 42
Photo of Stan Govorukhin
Stan Govorukhin@govorukhin

Norbert Wiener discovered in his pioneering work designing fe back algorithms for shooting down German bombers, feedback is what turns information into action.