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

by Cliff Kuang

When something works well enough for you to predict what it’ll do next, you eventually form a mental model of it. That mental model can be deep or shallow—it might vary from just a sense that this button does that, to a picture in your head about how your hybrid car charges its battery. But those mental models are knowingly crafted by the designers who put interfaces in front of you.

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

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.

Mental models are nothing more and nothing less than the intuitions we have about how something works—how its pieces and functions fit together. They’re based on the things we’ve used before; you might describe the entire task of user experience as the challenge of fitting a new product to our mental models of how things should work.

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.

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.

“Humans expect computers to act as though they were people and get annoyed when technology fails to respond in socially appropriate ways.”