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

by Cliff Kuang

Designers such as Henry Dreyfuss—who in the 1950s was still ascending the heights of his influence—should have been the ones to step in, figuring out where the meet-up was between business and user. But even they didn’t have any firm process for doing so, beyond their own intuitions. The question remained: How could you understand what you were supposed to invent, for whom, and why, if you didn’t have some genius with an unmistakable vision for what the world needed? Empathy, which had always been the vague and quirky heart of the design process, hadn’t yet been codified for industry, in a process that anyone might understand, copy, and reapply.

It turned out that the Chinese were using their phones differently than almost anyone in the West, using voice as the main interface, letting speech recognition programs do their texting instead of tapping out things themselves. Partly, this was simply easier, because of the cumbersome nature of tapping out Chinese characters on a smartphone. But the more interesting fact was that they weren’t just chatting with humans. They were using chat as their entry point into the digital world; rather than tapping through menus to find the right app, they were using their voice.

Let’s say you’d like to build a phone that’s easier to interact with while you’re driving and can’t look at the screen. You could try to study people driving with their phones. Or you could study how the blind use their phones. What workarounds do they use to determine when their phones are paired with another device when they can’t look to see? What aural feedback do apps need to provide when opened? You could build those features into a phone, so that by serving someone with a disability, you serve everyone else better. Holmes put it more succinctly: “We’re reframing disability as an opportunity.”