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

by Cliff Kuang

There’s a certain magic in how a few words can elide so many stories and so many ideas.

In an era in which 2.5 billion people own smartphones, user experience now occupies the center of modern life, remaking not just our digital lives but also business, society, even philanthropy.

Technology should become simpler over time. Then it should become simpler still, so that it disappears from notice.

How do you find the one thing wrong when the system is telling you there are hundreds?

Disasters always mirror the way things should work.

Those examples and others made Norman “realize that there wasn’t any understanding of technology combined with psychology. We were building technology for people, but the technologists didn’t understand people.”

You have to know why people behave as they do—and design around their foibles and limitations, rather than some ideal.

His great insight was that no matter how complex the technology, or how familiar, our expectations for it remain the same.

Despite every appearance of industrial precision, they had no abiding logic that a user could understand.

Feedback that works surrounds us every day, so we rarely think about it. It’s feedback that defines how a product behaves in response to what you want. It’s feedback that allows designers to communicate to their users in a language without words. Feedback is the keystone of the user-friendly world.

Feedback is what links the ineffable stuff in our minds—the things we want—with the machinery of our bodies and the information from our environment.

Feedback is what allows information to become action—and not just at the level of data, neurons, and nerves.

The natural world is filled with feedback; in the man-made world, that feedback has to be designed.

The world of everyday life is so densely layered with information that it can be hard to realize how much information—how much feedback—we have to re-create in the world of design.

feedback is what turns any man-made creation into an object that you relate to, one that might evoke feelings of ease or...

When we eat too much or eat the wrong things, it’s a problem of not realizing in the moment how that tiny choice might affect our future.

Even climate change can be seen as a feedback problem. We cannot see our everyday contributions to carbon emissions, and the timeline is too long for us to see their effects.

These are all problems of not feeling the stakes.

There may be no greater design challenge for the twenty-first century than creating better, tighter feedback loops in places where they don’t exist, be they in the environment, health care, or government.

eBay was an unknown startup until it rolled out a feature in which buyers and sellers could rate one another. Today, buyer/seller feedback is what has made us comfortable with the online economy—from buying products that we’ve never seen before on Amazon to staying in the homes of people we’ve never met, through Airbnb.

without feedback, internet commerce might not be like it is now, with strangers trusting one another. It might be more like hitchhiking, something done only by people willing to take a risk.

New technology improves the kind of feedback we can get, and how fast, allowing us to be more efficient and to act on new types of information.

While the goal of most feedback is just to reassure us that something has gone as we expected, there are higher values and needs that feedback can address, whether they be soothing us or making us anxious or spurring our competitive instincts.

When feedback is tied not merely to the way machines work but instead to the things we value most—our social circles, our self-image—it can become the map by which we chart our lives.

They had no mental model showing how all these disparate and strange events might be connected, which would have helped them deduce what was going on.

Mental models are nothing more and nothing less than the intuitions we have about how something works—how its pieces and functions fit together.

The creation of a shared understanding precedes any influence we might wield upon the world. Design is nothing more—and nothing less—than creating artifacts imbued with such shared understanding, legible to their users.

Almost all of design stems from making sure that a user can figure out what to do, and can tell what’s going on. The beauty and difficulty lie in what happens when the object at hand is new, but needs to feel familiar so that its newness isn’t baffling.

Design presumes that we can make objects humane, but doing so requires a different way of seeing the world.

a designer’s way of looking at the world: the sense that if our better selves are within easier reach, then of course we’ll be better people.

By understanding someone else’s life—abashed, prideful, confused, curious—you could make their life better. By understanding how he or she thought, you could reach past the obvious problem and into the problem that they couldn’t quite articulate, the one that they might not even think to solve.

There was a burgeoning sense that it wasn’t enough to merely make things cheaper than they had been—rather, things had to be made to be more desirable as well.

Yet these new ideas—of consumption as social progress, and aesthetic appeal as an engine for consumer demand—sprang up beneath a looming cloud.

the products people bought were the link between the individual pursuit of happiness and the steady growth of industry.

These visions of success brought forth two intertwined goals: modernizing how products looked, and rethinking how they worked.

If you’re familiar with design from that era, then you probably picture an airplane in polished steel, or a radio looking much the same, covered in chrome. These echoes were intentional; they were, at one point, dogma. Charismatic, silver-tongued designers such as Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes wanted to imbue their designs with a palpable ethos of progress.

The application of these forms was indiscriminate and universal, encompassing everything from refrigerators to pencil sharpeners, all of them meant to look as if they had been tested in a wind tunnel.

Designers, by aligning consumer design with business incentives, thus became high priests of the faith that better goods meant better lives all around.

We live in a sandbox of someone else’s design, made more clever because the information on offer on our phones, on our computers, in our cars confines us within a simplified version of the world.

One of the most consequential ideas to emerge from World War II was that machines might be bent around people, to better serve them, to better conform to the limits of their senses and minds—to be usable at a glance even in the worst conditions. From that crucible emerged the idea that you should be able to understand anything without ever thinking twice. Whether it’s a handheld supercomputer that a child can use, or a nuclear reactor that’s easy to troubleshoot, or a button that reinvents 911, these are things that take our limitations as the starting point and then build up from those assumptions, rather than assuming that we’ll always be the idealized demonstrator, doing exactly what some engineer had intended.

circumstances had forced them to invent a new perspective.

Only with such high stakes could a radically different paradigm—of fitting the machine to the man—take hold so quickly.

User-friendliness is simply the fit between the objects around us and the ways we behave.

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 drive’s boringness was a feat. Boringness implied ease rather than fear, a comfort with what was happening even if it was totally novel.

The secret is that we come to trust machines only if they mimic the way we come to trust other people.

to build a mental model of how a machine works, you needed to embed its workings in an interface that’s easy to navigate, with a consistent syntax for what every action meant, and feedback to tell you things were going right.

The second principle Lathrop calls the coffee-spilling principle: For us not to get surprised, then freaked out by a driverless car, we need to know what it is going to do before it’s actually done. Third, and perhaps most vital in fostering trust, is that we need to know what the car is seeing. And finally—the “plus one” in Lathrop’s formulation, because it relates not just to the user but to the interaction between user and machine—we need perfectly clear transitions when a car takes control, or when we take control from a car.

Nass liked to point out that our brains evolved to deal with two basic types of experience: the physical world and the social. Computers were a new hybrid of both; since their beginning, we had thought they belonged to the physical world. But because they responded to us, engaged us, aggravated and pleased us, we couldn’t help but see them as social actors. If so, we couldn’t help but assume that they’d hew to the rules of polite society.

Our expectations of machines are, to a startlingly consistent degree, well mapped to our expectations of actual human beings.