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by
Cliff Kuang
While politeness seems like a trivial detail, it is a design constraint as real as the heat tolerance of steel or the melting point of plastic.
He laid out those rules as a set of maxims, which boil down to being truthful, saying no more than you need to, being relevant, and being clear.13 Grice’s maxims also shed light on politeness. Being polite means following a conversation, not co-opting it and dragging it in other directions. It means knowing who you’re talking with, and knowing what they know. It’s rude to talk over people, to misunderstand who they are. Those maxims happen to neatly map to the same design principles laid out by Don Norman, and the ones that guided Brian Lathrop in the creation of Audi’s self-driving A7.
“Humans expect computers to act as though they were people and get annoyed when technology fails to respond in socially appropriate ways.
We take comfort in blaming humans when things go wrong. The NTSB took that point of view when it investigated the death of Joshua Brown. His Tesla had come with instructions, and he had plowed ahead all the same. He had, apparently, been too trusting of what the car could do, and unaware of its limitations. But why did the Tesla even let any driver’s trust outstrip what the machine could actually do? We demand that new technologies do not only what they promise, but what we imagine. We also demand that they behave in the way we guess they will, without ever having used them before. But making
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Metaphors become so embedded in our experience that they seem second nature: time is money; life is a journey; the body is a machine. But often, the metaphors we live with have been designed.
Metaphors accomplish something essential to human progress: They don’t just spur us to make new things; they inspire the ways in which those things will behave once they’re in our hands.
And yet Apple’s rise is nothing more or less than the story of three interfaces: the Macintosh OS, the iPod click wheel, and the iPhone touchscreen. Everything else has been fighting about how the pie would be divided up among competitors and copycats.
skeuomorphs,
“an element of a graphic user interface which mimics a physical object.
Who knows how much easier, how much more satisfying, our digital lives might be if the governing metaphor for smartphones were one of human connection, rather than programs.
Though the science and experimental methods behind these findings are still being hotly debated, designers have been acting on the idea of embodied metaphors since the dawn of the profession. One of Henry Dreyfuss’s first bestsellers was the Big Ben alarm clock, patented in 1931, which he gave a heavier base so that it would seem more reliable and of higher quality. We still live with the idea that heaviness conveys quality. One familiar example comes from the sound and feel of car doors. If you open and close the door on a Bentley, you’ll feel the weight and hear the sound, like the capstone
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In this chapter, we’ve tracked the various ways metaphors can be used to silently explain how something works. We’ve seen how unavoidable metaphors and metaphorical thinking are when trying to invent something new. Metaphor is no less important in how we make things beautiful. In the user-friendly world, beauty is a tool that transforms something that’s easy to use into something we want to use. Beauty pulls us in and makes us want to touch something, to own it, then use it. But beauty works associatively, necessarily referencing what we’ve found beautiful elsewhere. In that way, design is a
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And, as he started to play back the decade he’d spent teaching, he began to realize that the best students didn’t demonstrate creativity in solving a problem so much as in finding the problem.
finding an interesting problem is even more important that finding an interesting solution.
As John Arnold had articulated in his class about Arcturus IV, personal experience can blind. So Arnold sought new ways to free the mind of limitation—of personal bias. Bob McKim, in turn, believed that freeing the mind lay in looking out at the world as it was, of feeling the needs of others. Those ideas spread only after the invention of a process that could recast those New Age ideals for the rhythms of industry, retuning them for the insecurities of modern corporations fearful of being out-innovated.
As a child, she had a tiger mask, and she remembers thinking about the difference between how that mask looked on the outside and how it felt on the inside—a formative lesson
But when empathy becomes an imperative, then the question becomes: With whom should you empathize? Is the average user idealized in a template, like Joe and Josephine? Or is there something to be found in the lives of people at the edges, whose very difference might allow them to sense something that the rest of us cannot?
Microsoft’s framework for designing for artificial intelligence. One (“humans are the heroes”) is not to overshadow or edge
out the capabilities and preferences of the human; in other words, not to overshadow or shoehorn the client. 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 person’s preferences.18
No matter how often we say we’re creeped out by technology, we acclimate surprisingly quickly if it anticipates what we want.
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. Design methods themselves have codified that dynamic and entrenched it. Alan Cooper, the eminent user-experience designer who came up with the idea of user personas, has called this the Oppenheimer moment for product design.27
“Today, we, the tech practitioners, those who design, develop, and deploy technology, are having our own Oppenheimer moments,” Cooper once told a crowd of user-experience designers working in a field he himself had helped invent. “It’s that moment when you realize that your best intentions were subverted, when your product was used in unexpected and unwanted ways.”
Facebook has created the twenty-first-century equivalent to the suburban tract developments of Levittown: a place of homogeneity rather than diversity, where the only voices we hear are those of virtual neighbors who think exactly like us.
“Facebook’s most consequential impact may be in amplifying the universal
The ease of user-friendly design allows us to become the worst version of ourselves.
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.
By turning ourselves into consumers who see only the things that we want most, we might lose the possibility of becoming anything other than what a machine thinks we are—and the machine may not have gotten that right to begin with.
Henry Dreyfuss and his peers didn’t believe that convenience itself imbued us with greater meaning. We had to find that meaning on our own. It should not be surprising that the user-friendly world has not provided it for us.
Tristan Harris,
Thoughtless Acts
Like me, you may have finally learned how to successfully orchestrate each of these disparate interactions in the proper sequence, only to be chastised for not placing your items in the bagging area.
Checkouts need better bagging areas
Emotional Design
