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

by Cliff Kuang

Why should some product defer to our desires? How does the person who created that object come to understand what I want to begin with? What can go wrong in translating our desires into artifacts?

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.

the secret to having a productive argument with your spouse is to listen to what she has to say, repeat what you just heard, then finally have your spouse confirm that’s what she meant.

As he put it in his seminal paper “Machines Cannot Fight Alone”: The battle hangs on the power of the eyes or the ears to make a fine discrimination, to estimate a distance, to see or hear a signal which is just at the edge of human capacity. Radars don’t see, radios don’t hear, sonars don’t detect, guns don’t point without someone making a fine sensory judgment, and the paradox of it is that the faster the engineers and the inventors served up their “automatic” gadgets to eliminate the human factor the tighter the squeeze became on the powers of the operator—the man who must see and hear and judge and act with that margin of superiority which gives his outfit the jump on the enemy.5

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.

But with machines becoming more and more autonomous, it was perhaps even more important for the users to intuit what the machine was and the principles behind how it worked.

It took almost a century of progress to find the “user” in “user friendly,” and that journey was advanced by war. Only with such high stakes could a radically different paradigm—of fitting the machine to the man—take hold so quickly.

Dreyfuss intuited what lay behind that new paradigm: that the artifacts in our lives can’t make us happy unless they’re designed to serve us, with our limitations and foibles and errors.

Seeing humans as they are, instead of as they’re supposed to be, was one of the great, unappreciated intellectual shifts of the twentieth century.

What both user-friendliness and behavioral economics shared was an overriding sense that our minds could never be perfected, and that our imperfections made us who we are.

So while we might think that the user-friendly world is one of making user-friendly things, the bigger truth is that design doesn’t rely on artifacts. As my collaborator Robert Fabricant likes to say, it relies on our patterns of behavior. 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 truest material for making new things isn’t aluminum or carbon fiber. It’s behavior.30

“Metaphors die in repeated use but leave behind the reality that they had languaged into being.”)5

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

“You’re living in the year 2951. Space travel is well established and there is a good deal of trade in the galaxy,” he told the students. Arnold explained that the Terran trade agency, scouring the galaxy for commerce partners, had found the Methanians, thirty-three light-years away on a planet called Arcturus IV.6 The goal was to make something these Methanians wanted to buy. Arnold had crafted the limitations of the Methanians to force the students to imagine a life other than their own, and what that might entail. (“Do you think that the average present-day Terran designer gives as much thought to human limitations?” Arnold asked.) Arcturus IV was an unplowed field of consumer desire, primed for inventions. Its inhabitants were friendly and naive, but stuck with nineteenth-century technology. Their planet itself was an enormous hunk of the most valuable resources anyone could imagine during the nuclear age: uranium and platinum. But their needs were hyperbolically foreign. The Methanians were humanoid, but gangly and birdlike with egg-shaped bodies. They were physically weak and extraordinary slow.7 As the weeks went on, the students got into debates about whether the Methanians, who hatched from eggs, would find an egg-shaped car to be vulgar; whether the Methanians, with their slow reflexes, should be asked to adapt to the speed of new technologies.8 The students invented ingenious things: a drill that required two hands to turn on, so that slow-moving Methanians coul...

But the only way to teach people to predict what the world might need was to explode their assumptions.

“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.”

As the project began, Moggridge didn’t know if such a thing was even possible—if a computer really could be portable enough to be desirable. To test whether it was, he gathered up all the raw parts required in a computer—a hard drive, a floppy drive, a processor, and a display—and put them in a briefcase, which he would carry around all day. It was heavy, but workable. The problem wasn’t just making it lighter but making it small, when the display consumed so much space. 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.

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. Designing wasn’t something you did on paper.

Today, Fulton Suri’s insistence on rooting innovation in the nuance of individual experience has become the maxim that if you design for everyone, you design for no one.

All these processes are subsumed in a larger, ubiquitous framework—observe, prototype, test, and repeat—that equates observation with creation.

But that influence spread only because IDEO created the vocabulary that others could use to sell the idea that “design” wasn’t just prettiness. Rather, it was a process of industrialized empathy—one that could be marketed, explained, circulated, repeated, and then spread.

empathy, next to language and opposable thumbs, may be the most powerful tool that evolution has given us. It allows us not to be bound by personal experience. It allows us not to be limited by our stories.

The beauty of the design process as articulated at the dawn of the computer age was that we could all innovate, if only we knew how to empathize.

Just like so many designers we’ve met in the course of this book, Barrett realized that what we want out of technology is really defined by what we want from each other.

The problem was, technology was always adding new things to everyday life. The way to create a truly different world wasn’t to put more technology in it. Rather, you had to take all that stuff out. “If you want to make something feel different,” Barrett said, “you just take away everything unnecessary.” It was as good advice as any about how to map the future of what “user friendly” should become: a future in which high technology has become invisible enough to lead us back to how things were before high technology. It’s common to hear technologists articulate that same dream of making technology so useful that it’s invisible.

But how will it become so? Simply by weaving itself into the social fabric that preceded it; by becoming more humane. The teleology of technology’s march is that it should mirror us better—that it should travel an arc of increasing humaneness.

You sit at the end of a long line of inventions that might never have existed but for people with disabilities: the keyboard on your phone, the telecommunications lines it connects with, the inner workings of email. 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.

But the most critical piece of the history will be this: Disability is so often an engine of innovation, simply because humans will invent ways to satisfy their needs, no matter their limitations.

Somehow, in solving problems for someone at the edges of experience, they created products—from the typewriter to the telephone—that turned out to be useful to everyone.

De los Reyes was proposing a metaphor. He was hoping to find the digital world’s equivalent of the curb cut, something elegant that let everyone live a little easier. By learning how the overlooked, ranging from dyslexics to the deaf, pick their way through a world the rest of us navigate with little trouble, the hope was that one could actually build better products for everyone else. The idea was that in order to build machines that adapt to humans better, you needed a better process for watching how humans adapted to one another and to their world. “The point isn’t to solve for a problem,” such as typing when you’re blind, said Holmes. “We’re flipping it.” They were finding the expertise and ingenuity that arises naturally when people are forced to live a life different from most.

Holmes put it more succinctly: “We’re reframing disability as an opportunity.”

Both Ripple and Aeron were examples of people finding bigger solutions by trying to solve a harder, more specialized problem—and then stumbling onto something much more universal. So why not start with the hard problem? Design progresses only when it fits meaningful solutions to new problems. Over time, as our own quality of life improves, the problems get harder to find. That’s what it means for the world to be better and better designed—it means the problems become harder and harder to see. You eventually need new, novel frames of reference to see them—whether that’s by seeing how differently the digital world works in China or how many gaps exist in digital life for those at the margins.

today inclusive design has become a byword in the industry. Attitudes toward disability are changing.

The project that Holmes helped with, shadowing human personal assistants and learning how they eventually earned the trust of their clients, led to a series of recommended behaviors for Cortana, Microsoft’s competitor to Siri.

One (“humans are the heroes”) is not to overshadow or edge out the capabilities and preferences of the human;

Another is to “honor societal values” while respecting the social context of an interaction—again, to be discreet and well-mannered.

And another is to “evolve over time,” to learn the whims and nuances of a...

I asked Koklys to start describing Eno’s character and how it might emerge during a conversation. Eno, for example, would never be funny or cute when it failed to understand. It would use humor only to show empathy with someone. “Eno has core traits, a backstory, and things Eno likes and dislikes,” she said. “We actually designed character flaws because we found that’s how people connect with characters.” I asked what that meant: What was Eno’s personality, and what were her personality flaws?

This is the reason the MagicBands might have been worth $1 billion to Disney. Using them, the company had managed to recast its cold business logic—the chance to turn over tables quicker by eliminating many aspects of waiter service—into something a vacationing family of three had actually described as magic. Somehow, Disney World had turned a high-tech surveillance operation into a delight.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,”

I could glimpse the park breathing people in, breathing data out.

In setting the Imagineers on a pedestal apart from operations, Walt had created a model common across countless companies today, in which innovation is viewed as a function owned by an anointed few, rather than an emergent property of the system.

As studies have shown, innovation labs usually fail not because of a lack of ideas but because at some point those new ideas require new ways of working.16

Within the trade, this is often described as “shipping your org chart.” This is the greatest open challenge in the user-friendly world: how to create one coherent face to the user, when the company behind that face is really a federation, atomized in order to make the work efficient.

Organizational theorists point out that it’s not enough for change to be proposed, or for it to make sense. The need has to be felt.

“The best way to anticipate the future is to design it.”

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.

the key would be making people feel the personalization as a luxury—and not as a creeping incursion. If it’s your birthday, a crew member should be socially savvy enough not to say, “Hey, I see it’s your birthday!”—thereby alerting you that you are, in a real sense, being monitored. Instead, they would tune their appeal. They might ask, “Are you celebrating a special occasion with us?” In doing so, they would open a conversational path that might seem like a lucky opening for freebies or better service, but which had been quietly engineered all along.