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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Cliff Kuang
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December 22, 2019 - March 26, 2020
a rude machine is worse than one that simply doesn’t work.
Whether it’s the rules of conversation or the rules of interface design, the goal is to communicate in a way that’s easy to follow.
The interactions are all structured around feedback, so that both partners know that they’re aligned.
It wasn’t that the internet didn’t work. It was that all too often, no one understood what the internet was.
metaphors provide us a web of inferences, which we use to explain the underlying logic of how something should work.
The right metaphor is like an instruction manual but better, because it teaches you how something should work without you ever having to be told.
To say that information is a stream suggests that it’s there for the taking, if we wish to drink, not that we have to consume it all.
The different metaphors come prepackaged with their own etiquette.
Metaphors strip away what’s specialized and complex, focusing our attention on just the few things we need to make sense of something, the ideas we share.
Metaphors will always be one of our most powerful entry points to the user-friendly world, possessing the singular ability to make the foreign feel familiar, providing us mental models for how
The organic growth of the Macintosh OS shows how metaphors can not only explain ideas but generate them.
Metaphors accomplish something essential to human progress: They don’t just spur us to make new things; they inspire the ways in which those things will behave once they’re in our hands.
a major part of what saved the company in the years after Steve Jobs returned was the iPod’s click wheel, which cracked the problem of making it fun to browse incredibly long lists (which themselves were formatted in the drop-down menus that Bill Atkinson invented for the Lisa).
That’s how metaphors work: Once their underlying logic becomes manifest, we forget that they were ever there.
In digesting new technologies, we climb a ladder of metaphors, and each rung helps us step up to the next. Our prior assumptions lend us confidence about how a new technology works. Over time, we find ourselves farther and farther from the rungs we started with, so that we eventually leave them behind,
Part of the reason that we can’t seem to think without resorting to metaphors of some kind is that ideas themselves, when they emerge from our brains, emerge from the same neural pathways in which our bodies are represented.
Designers still scour the world for metaphors that relate not just to how we understand a product, but how we feel when we use it. The ways in which those metaphors are used reveals a different angle on user-friendliness, showing the ways beauty can be adapted to other uses.
This is almost a universal practice in design, creating mood boards to summon how something should look and feel, and then trying to translate those into form-giving metaphors and words.
In the user-friendly world, beauty is a tool that transforms something that’s easy to use into something we want to use.
Industrialized empathy hinges on the idea that would-be innovators—such as the well-meaning but wrongheaded inventors of the Edsel, or even Homer, with his God-given sense that everyone was just like him—are held back by their own point of view and need to slip loose of it.
“Our cultural milieu, our peers, and norms instilled in how we act, look, talk, and relate to our environment contribute to our blindness and limit how we generate new ideas.”
“But their mental models of what they were doing were different. That’s the trick about user-centered design. The explicit need versus the latent need. People will usually tell you what they want, but not what they need.”
The most important problems to solve were those that weren’t being expressed. The most important questions to ask were those that people never thought to ask themselves.
To create a design that worked, you had to build it, watch it fail while people tried to use it, fix it, then watch it fail again until you finally had something.
What user-centered design did was to build a sensing process that gave companies a way to mimic that of the inventor.
While mankind had spent thousands of years creating tools for changing the physical world, Bush argued, it was now time to create knowledge tools.
We seem bound to repeat this tug-of-war whenever a new technology arises. And even when we do side with the users—even when we do side with us—that inevitably brings up the question of who counts as “us.”
new interface paradigms don’t come along often. When they do, they are extinction events, leveling ecosystems and clearing the way for a new race to the top.
The smartphone is a different thing in China. It’s built upon a different mental model. Apps aren’t too popular and neither are app stores. Your operating system isn’t nearly as important as your chat app, because your chat app is where everything happens.
what we want out of technology is really defined by what we want from each other.
In 1808, Pellegrino Turri built the first typewriter so that his blind lover, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, could write letters more legibly. In 1872, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone to support his work helping the deaf. And in 1972, Vint Cerf programmed the first email protocols for the nascent internet. He believed fervently in the power of electronic letters, because electronic messaging was the best way to communicate with his wife, who was deaf, while he was at work.
Disability is so often an engine of innovation, simply because humans will invent ways to satisfy their needs, no matter their limitations.
It’s easy enough to say that technology will become more humane. It’s hard to say how that will happen. But the only way to expand the universe of people who get counted when we imagine who the “user” is in “user friendly” is by bringing context and human messiness into a design process that typically subsumes differences into averages.
Making things easier to use is often another form of arbitrage: You find users at the extremes, solving problems that others might take for granted.
One (“humans are the heroes”) is not to overshadow or edge out the capabilities and preferences of the human; in other words, not to overshadow or shoehorn the client.
“You would be surprised how delighted people are when they can extend the conversation beyond a functional-use case,”
making Eno simply capable as a robot banker wasn’t enough to keep users engaged. “In the end, we’re trying to build a relationship and gain trust,” Koklys said. “The way we’re doing that is through character.”
“We actually designed character flaws because we found that’s how people connect with characters.”
A major bank had declined to reveal the personality traits of a robot it had created, because the bank believed that the personality of its robot would make people more apt to do business with them.
No matter how often we say we’re creeped out by technology, we acclimate surprisingly quickly if it anticipates what we want.
innovation labs usually fail not because of a lack of ideas but because at some point those new ideas require new ways of working.
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.
Time and time again, in the move from paper money to credit cards to mobile payments, one iron law of commerce has been that less friction means more consumption.
“It always galled me that in the vacation industry, people call it innovation when you segment some tiny group and do something special for them. Democratizing what was previously only for the elite is a game changer.”
The web was a vastly different place at the time. User feedback didn’t reach much beyond Reddit’s up/down voting system and five-star reviewing platforms on sites such as eBay. Almost nothing existed that affirmed something, rather than rating it.
our circuitry didn’t evolve to reward us for finding out what we already know. On the other hand, when things don’t turn out like we expect, our brains catch fire.
The most enduring businesses in the world have always been built upon addiction—alcohol, tobacco, drugs. 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.
our behavior has become a design material, just as our intuitions about the physical world once were—and those behaviors are often involuntary. It shouldn’t be surprising that our psychological quirks necessarily lie at the core of every app or product that takes hold in the market.
The more seamless an experience is, the more opaque it becomes.
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.
