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

by Cliff Kuang

“Dreyfuss brings to his work no special aptitude for mechanics and only a moderate gift in the handling of materials,” noted The New Yorker in 1931, in one of the first glossy profiles anywhere of an industrial designer. But “he has to a high degree a sense of the ultimate use to which commodities will be put, a feeling for the comfort of the man who is going to use the fountain pen for writing more than as a decorative adjunct to his desk.” (Emphasis mine.) 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.

As the historian Russell Flinchum wrote in his seminal book about Henry Dreyfuss, “He was beginning to define an approach that was friendly to big business but still allowed him to criticize the status quo, that was protective of the consumer without being patronizing.”

Instead, as the historian Donna Haraway writes, “Yerkes and his liberal peers advocated studying traits of the body, mind, spirit, and character in order to fit ‘the person’ into the proper place in industry … Differences were the essential subject for the new science. Personnel research would provide reliable information for the employment manager and proper vocational counseling for the ‘person.’” (Emphasis mine.) They called their discipline human engineering.6

They realized that as much as humans might learn, they would always be prone to err. But if you understood why these errors occurred, they could be designed out of existence.

With the iPhone, Saproo said, “you were closer to what you wanted to do, and you were closer to what it means to be human.” Later, the obvious hit me: Nearly eighty years after Henry Dreyfuss first preached that design could yield social progress simply by delivering ease, Saproo had given testament to how ubiquitous such faith had become.

The email in-box borrows its logic from your mail, and you probably at least glance at every piece of mail that’s sent to you—simply because they were all meant for you. Your email in-box carries the same logic. The Instagram “feed” or the Twitter “stream” are entirely different metaphors.10 A stream rushes on even if you’re not there to see; it gurgles by in the dark, when you’re asleep. 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.

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.

By eliminating all the check-out steps required to buy something online, 1-Click gave Amazon a decisive edge against cart abandonment, which, according to some studies, averages 70 percent and remains one of the two or three biggest challenges to online retailers.

At one time, it was important for a file “folder” to indeed look like a folder, so that you knew it did the same thing. By the mid-2000s the details had gotten baroque. To know how the calendar worked, you didn’t need the calendar on every Mac to look as if it had been bound by stitched leather;

Beauty pulls us in and makes us want to touch something, to own it, then use it. But beauty works associatively, necessarily referencing what we’ve found beautiful elsewhere. In that way, design is a kind of arbitrage: finding beauty in one place, delivering it to others.

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

“What would the human potential look like if you took that away? If you took away fear, would creativity blossom?”

Perhaps inspired by the briefcase itself, Moggridge hit upon the now-universal clamshell design, where the display could be closed for carrying, then unfolded for use. The genius lay in how it protected the screen while allowing the user to adjust the viewing angle.

But how? In the 1990s, Alan Cooper, an architecture student turned computer programmer, created the concept of a persona—an idealized user, composited from interviews. A persona, and the needs and everyday life it represented, could be literally pinned up on the wall so that designers might be able to place themselves in the mind-set of the people they were trying to help.

“They weren’t lying,” Brown said. “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.”

But Jobs didn’t place much faith in process; he placed it in his own intuitions and judgments. As a result, his quote has been seized by countless entrepreneurs, happy to be told that their instincts are all that matter.

What user-centered design did was to build a sensing process that gave companies a way to mimic that of the inventor.

Uber and Lyft both tantalize drivers with another feature, which Uber calls “forward dispatch,” that queues up the next drive before the present one has ended—much like Netflix queues up the next episode of a series. “It requires very little effort to binge on Netflix; in fact, it takes more effort to stop than keep going,” noted the scholars Matthew Pittman and Kim Sheehan.

Whose choices are we making? By turning ourselves into consumers who see only the things that we want most, we might lose the possibility of becoming anything other than what a machine thinks we are—and the machine may not have gotten that right to begin with.

Call it the user-friendly paradox: As gadgets get easier to use, they become more mysterious; they make us more capable of doing what we want, while also making us more feeble in deciding whether what we seem to want is actually worth doing.