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

by Cliff Kuang

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 sealing a vault. Do the same with a Kia, and you’ll notice how much lighter it feels, how it sounds cheaper. Though the Bentley is heavier, made of finer stuff, its door doesn’t have to feel heavy. The hinge, after all, supports the door. It could have been tuned to make the door feel weightless. But it wasn’t, because the designers took the time to make sure that the Bentley commanded as much metaphorical heaviness as the bank account required to buy it. Designers still scour the world for metaphors that relate not just to how we understand a product, but how we feel when we use it. The ways in which those metaphors are used reveals a different angle on user-friendliness, showing the ways beauty can be adapted to other uses.