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

by Cliff Kuang

The next generation of design will become less about screens and things, and more about scripts and cues.

As a kid in the 1910s, decades before he would come to loom over academic psychology, Burrhus Frederic Skinner assumed that a person could be molded just like any machine. He was already testing that thesis out as a boy, using himself as a subject. Once, after his mother hounded him about picking up his clothes, he resolved to train away his own forgetfulness by redesigning his bedroom. First, he arranged a flag to block the doorway. This he attached to a pulley, and on the other end a clothes hook. The flag would raise only if he’d hung his pajamas there.7 Skinner couldn’t articulate it at the time, but the guiding thought seemed to be: Here is something that I don’t want to do, that I can never remember to do. But the right environment will make me do it. The idea hovered over his life with an eerie consistency.

In the last few decades, neuroscientists have finally begun to understand why this happens. When things turn out just as we expect, the reward centers in our brains stay dormant. After all, 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. Alert to the chance of gleaning a new pattern, our reward centers buzz. It’s the same dopamine circuitry triggered by heroin and cocaine. So-called variable rewards pop up most obviously in casinos, and in the design of slot machines, on which Americans spend more money than movies, baseball, and theme parks combined.

“Once you know how to push people’s buttons, you can play them like a piano,” wrote the designer Tristan Harris.

That ethos gave rise to the idea, after World War II, that the reason pilots were crashing planes wasn’t simply that they needed better instructions. Men died, and others such as Alphonse Chapanis realized that the training was inherently flawed, because men were flawed. For men to perform better in machines, they didn’t need to be trained more; rather, the machine needed to be crafted around them so that they needed to be trained less.

For a brief period in Silicon Valley, that search for addictiveness seemed harmless—partly because addiction itself was usually framed as “engagement,” a Silicon Valley byword for having users constantly coming back for more.

Boiled down, Fogg’s model is simply that we form new habits when triggers in our environment allow us to act upon our motivations—pleasure and pain, hope and fear, belonging and rejection. Goading a user into action is merely about having triggers arrive at the perfect time, and letting us act upon them with maximal ease. And what’s the best way to reward those actions? Uncertain rewards that tickle our dopamine centers, of course.

A striking example comes from Uber. After a lengthy investigation, the New York Times journalist Noam Scheiber discovered that the company was using insights from behavioral economics to get its drivers to work longer hours.25 One trick capitalized on the human preoccupation with goals. Drivers would be prompted with messages such as “You’re $10 away from making $330 in net earnings. Are you sure you want to go offline?” The number was arbitrary, and the goal essentially meaningless. But for the goal to work, it didn’t have to mean anything. It just had to be slightly out of reach—much like how the final reel on a slot machine will slow down to make you think you’re just about to hit three cherries, then slip by at the last moment.

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.

“While this is unquestionably true, there is another way to think of the logic of forward dispatch: It overrides self-control.” There are other flavors to this psychological hack.

The market has filled our lives with products that are easier and easier to use; these have culminated in glossy skeins of code—Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and almost any app that you find on a smartphone—that tickle the most ancient parts of our brains, tied to the very way we learn about the world.

Today, Skinner’s blind focus on whatever goads an animal into action has been transformed, thanks to technology platforms, into a presumption that what users want can be reduced to what makes them click. It is a presumption that totally omits motive in favor of impulse and action.

The end goal of consumer technology has always been to buff and round every corner, so that each detail is so alluringly simple that it seems “inevitable.”

We can fit machines to us—to our individual personalities and whims.

Yet in hiding great complexity behind alluringly simple buttons, we also lose the ability to control how things work, to take them apart, and to question the assumptions that guided their creation. Modern user experience is becoming a black box. This is an iron law of user-friendliness: The more seamless an experience is, the more opaque it becomes.

The supposed inevitability of a design bleeds into the inevitability of the choices we are allowed to make.

We become rats in a Skinner box with only one lever to push, and so we push and push, because there is nothing else to do.

But there is a point at which we are so far from how things work that we cease to use a product, and the product begins to use us.

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.

One was the so-called Futures Wheel, a method of generating ideas about what we might invent, based on what kind of futures we want to create.

industrialized empathy might be if it were crafted around not merely what the user wanted but who the user might want to become, and the world she might want to create.

Rather, they’ve grown larger, as technology creates the ability to smooth out the friction in the systems that the user-friendly world has made available to us. Today, you don’t need to design a different bus to design an entirely new bus system; moreover, you don’t need to remake a government in order to deliver the structures people need to improve their lives.

User-friendly design is being applied to greater swaths of everyday life—and design itself is coming to encompass things we hardly think of as design at all. We might demand that an app be easy to understand, without an explanation needed. So why shouldn’t we demand the same from government, from our food supply, from our health care?

Moreover, the tools of design itself are being applied to higher-order problems. The Gates Foundation, one of the most consequential funders in the world, was built upon the premise of sensing the right problems to solve through the process of design thinking. (In fact, the foundation was for years one of IDEO’s most prolific and high-profile clients.4 More recently, it hired my collaborator Robert Fabricant’s team at Dalberg Design to bring greater integration of human-centered design into its global health portfolio.)

A hundred years of exploding consumer choice have pulled us apart, blinding us to the costs of what we consume, in the name of making that consumption easier. The problem now is how to design for individual happiness while aiming us all toward higher ends that we can’t accomplish on our own. We can no longer assume that a better world will come merely as a by-product of making more people comfortable. Whether the problem is climate change or fake news, design must now help us make decisions based not just on what’s easy to use, but on what we should be using in the first place.

Rosenstein brought up the idea of a Hegelian dialectic—the idea that society creates a thesis that’s met with a reaction, then an antithesis that amends that prior paradigm, and finally a synthesis, which resolves the tension between the two.

Where Dreyfuss assumed that greater good would come of giving people greater ease and the wherewithal to use the time they saved in pursuit of higher goals, we know now that higher goals have to be designed into the things we make.

inclusive design, which was founded on the assumption that disability isn’t a limitation of the user but a mismatch between the user and the world we’ve designed.

That’s not how we interact with our phones, because our phones were founded on the metaphor that they are tools to be used for tasks that we’ve already defined. As a result, it can be impossible to set forth our broader goals—to be happier, or to be closer with the people we care about.

The next phase in user experience will be to change our founding metaphors so that we can express our higher needs, not just our immediate preferences.

“So much of what we try to do is get to a point where the solution seems inevitable: you know, you think, ‘Of course it’s that way, why would it be any other way?’”

But none of the things we make are ever inevitable. They only feel that way because someone buffed away everything that called attention to itself for the wrong reasons—a button that didn’t make sense or a menu that was hard to understand. They only feel inevitable because someone designed them, and in doing so buffed away the clues of what might have been otherwise.

The easy and the simple are not identical. To discover what is really simple and to act upon the discovery is an exceedingly difficult task. —John Dewey, Experience and Education

As the acclaimed Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa—an early IDEO employee—eloquently put it, the best designs “dissolve into behavior” so that they become invisible rather than stand out for their artistry. In other words, the success of our work was not to be found in the beauty of the result, but rather in observing how it fit into and supported people’s actual behavior.

I am fond of telling new designers on my team that “behavior is our medium,” not products or technologies.

This shift also means that designers must accept the consequences of their work in the world, not just the intentions that went into designing them or the beauty of the result. These consequences can encompass environmental concerns (for example, not wanting to produce more disposable junk) as well as the broader societal impacts that come with influencing people’s behavior.

When conducting research in a new context or situation—whether that was a trading desk on Wall Street or a savings-and-loan group in Rwanda—we often worked with users to visually map each of the links in their decision trees to get a better understanding of whom they turn to first and trust the most.

customer experience for a large U.S. health-care company, I would never have predicted that my team at Frog would end up speaking with a group of hairdressers in Pensacola, Florida. But one of our first activities was to ask typical customers, “Who do you turn to for advice when your child is sick?” A number of women we interviewed mentioned that they frequently discussed personal health issues with their hairdressers. Unlike a pharmacist or even a doctor, a hairdresser has nothing at stake in selling health products, which makes her at once trustworthy to her clients and a potentially very valuable resource for exactly the sort of user insights that the health-care industry lacks—as well as a source for inspiration.

This is why you should always meet users on their turf, and why you should also conduct research in a way that puts them in the lead. They should be the guide to their own world. (The Stanford design professor Dev Patnaik calls this the “Grand Tour.”)

Designers have developed a number of clever techniques to open up fresh windows into users’ lives.

dubbed this technique “bag-mapping,” which he perfected in his days as a globe-trotting researcher for Nokia. “Bag-mapping is a useful exercise to become acquainted with the norms of a society,” he said. “What we do or don’t decide to carry is a reflection of ourselves and the environment in which we live and work.” In other words, we use these techniques not to learn about the objects themselves (though that can be interesting) but to get at the deeper motivations behind people’s choices, particularly their habitual ones. It is one way to explore the gaps between what people say matters to them and what they do in their day-to-day lives.

In many ways the apps on our smartphones are an alternate version of similar choices,

Among other things, our follow-up research identified a series of metaphors that could make the product easier to understand. For example, we encouraged users to chew gum during our sessions and reflect on how the flavor dissolved over time in their mouths, the same way that the antiretroviral medicine to prevent HIV would dissolve in their bodies and eventually run out and need to be replaced.

Our designers would try switching roles where possible. As Jane Fulton Suri noted: “The critical component is to not just notice what people are doing, but to really try to understand what’s driving it,” which can be best understood from a variety of perspectives. Sometimes you might even get behind the sales counter and see people’s behavior from the other side.

The world is not chaotic or random, even if it appears that way at first. People’s behavior and choices follow certain patterns and routes that do not always appear logical when you first encounter them. But if you tune in to their patterns and truly walk in their shoes, you can get at the hidden truths that drive their daily routines, whether they live in Pensacola, Florida, or Kigali, Rwanda.

Feedback is the fundamental language of user-friendly design. But the big challenge with designing feedback is figuring out when and where to provide it.

“Treat your competitors as your first prototypes.” Take advantage of all the effort that some designers have put into their work and learn from it. This is a great way to understand the choices that various designers have made when faced with the exact same challenge: designing feedback.

looking for patterns that emerge at each level. What objects are people using? Where do they seem completely confident and engaged versus hesitant or frustrated? Where do groups gather and why? I instruct my teams to make careful note of what is surprising or confusing. Patterns of behavior will emerge naturally.7 Using this approach, you will start to notice behaviors that stand out from the norm. Designers are always delighted to stumble upon these outliers in the course of user observation. If you watch six or seven people in a given situation, often one or two will stand out in the way they behave or respond. The beauty of this approach is that it only takes one outlier to give you a fresh perspective, but you have to follow up and engage the outlier one-on-one (without judgment) to better understand how his or her needs or motivations veer from the norm.

Today’s niche markets will become tomorrow’s mass markets. Small investments in studying the behavior of outliers today can drive future adoption on a large scale. At Frog, we viewed extreme or outlier research as an important point of competitive differentiation, because it often inspired solutions that wouldn’t occur to our clients who were too deeply immersed in their fields to see them.

“Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”