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

by Cliff Kuang

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 kind of arbitrage: finding beauty in one place, delivering it to others. Beneath every product you see, there is a designer, sometimes a good one, whose fodder is an intuition about what you’ve seen before, what you might admire. “Beauty” is the word we use when a designer’s vision overlaps with our own.