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

by Cliff Kuang

Humans might fail—but they are not wrong. And if you try to mirror their thinking a little, even the stupidest and strangest things that people do have their own indelible logic. You have to know why people behave as they do—and design around their

Mental models are nothing more and nothing less than the intuitions we have about how something works—how its pieces and functions fit together. They’re based on the things we’ve used before; you might describe the entire task of user experience as the challenge of fitting a new product to our mental models of how things should work.

Whether it’s a suit that augments your muscles, a driverless car, or an artificially intelligent assistant, any technology that asks us to cede what we could once only do for ourselves will need to understand our mores.

Clippy never learned your name, how you worked, what you preferred. Worst of all, no matter how useless Clippy was, he still smiled with puffed-up posture, taunting you. Clippy was unconscionably rude, and a rude machine is worse than one that simply doesn’t work.

Similarly, the Dyson vacuum, with its exposed piping and carefully outlined motor casings, was meant to tell a story about the company’s zeal for engineering. The transparent dust canister, a first in the history of vacuum cleaners, was likewise meant to show you what all that machinery had done. Seeing the dust you’d just gathered created a feedback loop that hadn’t existed before. If you own a Dyson, then you know the satisfaction of being surprised by the sheer volume of all that dust you’ve collected, and how it just makes you want to vacuum more.

Disability is so often an engine of innovation, simply because humans will invent ways to satisfy their needs, no matter their limitations.

one iron law of commerce has been that less friction means more consumption.

we root for underdogs when they win because they don’t simply reaffirm the world we already know.

But unlike slot machines, our personal Skinner boxes don’t offer the prospect of riches. The market has figured out exactly the bare minimum that will keep us coming back.

“Facebook’s most consequential impact may be in amplifying the universal tendency toward tribalism.

As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metalworking before picking up a knife, the Bronze Age wouldn’t have amounted to much.

Almost every designer I’ve ever met has come to a point in their career when they’ve wondered whether they actually made the world better by making more things—a consequence of the design industry’s founding belief that consumption was the path to human progress.

“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?’” he said in a rare interview.12 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.