User Friendly How the Hidden Rules of Design are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play
Reviews
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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»
When your friends or family ask what you really do as a designer, this is the book to give to them.
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).
Highlights
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.
Norbert Wiener discovered in his pioneering work designing fe back algorithms for shooting down German bombers, feedback is what turns information into action.