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

by Cliff Kuang

we didn’t really struggle hard enough to go beyond just solving the problem, and give the thing some real life or excellence beyond the expected.”

Perhaps you’re reading this book with your phone by your side, checking your email whenever your attention drifts, tapping text messages to a friend. 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.

The convenience takes hold before the goose bumps can set in.

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