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

Stan Govorukhin

Karolina

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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