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

by Cliff Kuang

since computers are so smart, wouldn’t it make sense to teach computers about people, instead of teaching people about computers?

We were building technology for people, but the technologists didn’t understand people.”

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 foibles and limitations, rather than some ideal.

It was perhaps only natural that as the smartphone came to take over our everyday lives, the principles that had created it would come to seem like the answers not just to problems of the moment (How do I get people to understand this app?) but to problems of the era (How do I get people to understand their health care?). It made perfect sense if you believed that all these problems came down to the way that the machines failed the people who used them—and knowing that those failures revealed a truth about how people made sense of the world around them, and how they expected the artifacts of everyday life to behave.

The plant and the men were talking past each other: The plant hadn’t been designed to anticipate the imaginations of men; the men couldn’t imagine the workings of a machine.

Feedback that works surrounds us every day, so we rarely think about it. It’s feedback that defines how a product behaves in response to what you want. It’s feedback that allows designers to communicate to their users in a language without words. Feedback is the keystone of the user-friendly world.

Feedback is what allows information to become action—and not just at the level of data, neurons, and nerves.

The natural world is filled with feedback; in the man-made world, that feedback has to be designed.

There may be no greater design challenge for the twenty-first century than creating better, tighter feedback loops in places where they don’t exist, be they in the environment, health care, or government.

When feedback is tied not merely to the way machines work but instead to the things we value most—our social circles, our self-image—it can become the map by which we chart our lives. It can determine how the experiences around us feel. In an era when how a product feels to use is the measure of how much we’ll use it, this is everything.

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.

Buttons, in turn, have become the connection point between our will and the user-friendly world. Embedded in them is a fundamental truth about how our minds make sense of the world. As banal as buttons may seem, properly viewed they can also seem like everything. The point arrives from surprising places, all the time. For me, the strangest was when my wife told me that her psychologist had said that the secret to having a productive argument with your spouse is to listen to what she has to say, repeat what you just heard, then finally have your spouse confirm that’s what she meant. Push the button, provide feedback, confirm the action. Like a button. The creation of a shared understanding precedes any influence we might wield upon the world. Design is nothing more—and nothing less—than creating artifacts imbued with such shared understanding, legible to their users.

Almost all of design stems from making sure that a user can figure out what to do, and can tell what’s going on. The beauty and difficulty lie in what happens when the object at hand is new, but needs to feel familiar so that its newness isn’t baffling.

By understanding someone else’s life—abashed, prideful, confused, curious—you could make their life better. By understanding how he or she thought, you could reach past the obvious problem and into the problem that they couldn’t quite articulate, the one that they might not even think to solve.

“He was beginning to define an approach that was friendly to big business but still allowed him to criticize the status quo, that was protective of the consumer without being patronizing.”

One of the most consequential ideas to emerge from World War II was that machines might be bent around people, to better serve them, to better conform to the limits of their senses and minds—to be usable at a glance even in the worst conditions. From that crucible emerged the idea that you should be able to understand anything without ever thinking twice. Whether it’s a handheld supercomputer that a child can use, or a nuclear reactor that’s easy to troubleshoot, or a button that reinvents 911, these are things that take our limitations as the starting point and then build up from those assumptions, rather than assuming that we’ll always be the idealized demonstrator, doing exactly what some engineer had intended.

as much as humans might learn, they would always be prone to err. But if you understood why these errors occurred, they could be designed out of existence.

The magic of a well-designed invention is that you seem to know how it will work even before you’ve used it.

There are three things an autonomous car has to get right, plus one: Above all, we need to know what mode a car is in, whether it’s driving itself or not. That harks to probably the oldest axiom in interface design—mode confusion causes most airplane crashes. Alfonse Chapanis and Paul Fitts were the first to discover it when they studied World War II pilots who’d engaged the wing flaps instead of the landing gear. The second principle Lathrop calls the coffee-spilling principle: For us not to get surprised, then freaked out by a driverless car, we need to know what it is going to do before it’s actually done. Third, and perhaps most vital in fostering trust, is that we need to know what the car is seeing. And finally—the “plus one” in Lathrop’s formulation, because it relates not just to the user but to the interaction between user and machine—we need perfectly clear transitions when a car takes control, or when we take control from a car.

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. Those designs will have to understand what’s appropriate or tactful or simply nice, because that’s the way humans build trust. 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.

Paul Grice, the great philosopher of language who helped define that field in the twentieth century, thought of conversation as adhering to unspoken rules of cooperation. 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.

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.

When you’re in dialogue with a computer, the logic of creating a trustworthy machine isn’t just about fitting machines to the man, but weaving machines into our social fabric. There’s a culture to how things should behave.

Whether we’re communicating with a human or a machine, the goal is to create a shared understanding of the world. That’s the point behind both the rules governing polite conversation and how a user-friendly machine should work.

In digesting new technologies, we climb a ladder of metaphors, and each rung helps us step up to the next. Our prior assumptions lend us confidence about how a new technology works. Over time, we find ourselves farther and farther from the rungs we started with, so that we eventually leave them behind,

In the years since they first proposed the idea of embodied cognition, experimental psychologists have offered tantalizing evidence that Lakoff and Johnson might be right.32 In one experiment, people who held a warm coffee cup were more likely to judge another person as trustworthy. Thus, “warming up” to someone didn’t seem to be just an abstract metaphor. Because that metaphor dwelled somewhere in our brains, it could be hacked: Being physically warmed could change our emotional judgments. Other studies provided similar evidence for much different metaphors: Participants in one experiment, when asked to think about the future, leaned slightly forward; when asked to think about the past, they leaned back. The underlying metaphor was that the future lay ahead. In still another example, those assigned to fill out questionnaires while using a heavier clipboard offered more serious answers to the questions. Importance was heavy.33

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.

finding an interesting problem is even more important that finding an interesting solution.

every one of those tiny fixes pointed to a problem that had gone overlooked—to a mismatch between the things people needed, the world they lived in, and the way they behaved.

The stories people lived weren’t the stories they told themselves. “They weren’t lying,” Brown said. “But their mental models of what they were doing were different. That’s the trick about user-centered design. The explicit need versus the latent need. People will usually tell you what they want, but not what they need.”

“If you want to make something feel different,” Barrett said, “you just take away everything unnecessary.”

Perhaps one day someone will write a history of the internet in which that great series of tubes will emerge not as some miracle of technical progress meant to connect people faster and easier but rather a chain of inventions each meant to help more and more types of people to better communicate. But the most critical piece of the history will be this: Disability is so often an engine of innovation, simply because humans will invent ways to satisfy their needs, no matter their limitations.

finding innovation at the edges highlights a tension that existed in the very roots of design: a focus on the mythical idea of the average consumer.

“There is no such thing as a normal human,” Holmes said. “Our capabilities are always changing.”

Today, skeuomorphism doesn’t just lie in tools aping the tools that came before them, but rather in how machines mime our behavior, down to the ums and ahs. The right suggestion, made at the most tactful time, becomes what wood and metal were to another generation of designers—material waiting to be bent toward a purpose. Both our behavior and our mores are now the material for design.

Disney wasn’t experiencing something unique. Rather, it was experiencing something that has become common in this user-friendly era, when entire organizations have to work together to create one simple thing that every one of their customers will touch. How do you get one thousand people to agree on a single detail in an app, or one tiny piece of the MagicBand system, if they don’t share a vision? The modern corporation wasn’t designed to serve up a coherent experience. It was designed for the division of labor, to expend its energies on the efficiency of the parts rather than the shape of the whole. Those seams are obvious once you start to look at them:

you can feel the companies behind these products, which seem so polished, fighting with themselves. This isn’t to say those companies are failing or even struggling—far from it. But even while their core businesses keep hauling money in, the possibilities of what they might build seem ever more elusive. And so these companies, with their hundreds of different products and business units, become bigger and harder to navigate over time. Instead of offering more with less friction, they simply offer more.

“People ask me all the time how you deal with complexity,” Padgett said. “It comes down to putting people together and letting them work it out.”

with all this hyperpersonalization, with all the crew around you knowing what you’re interested in, what you did today, and what you’ll do tomorrow, the key would be making people feel the personalization as a luxury—and not as a creeping incursion. 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 freebies or better service, but which had been quietly engineered all along. “Yes, we’ve invested in technology,” said Swartz. “But we’re spending countless hours rewriting procedures and role descriptions … If I want to share a glass of wine at sunset, I won’t have to interrupt the moment to make eye contact with a waiter. It will find me. But the crew bringing the wine has to be trained to let me have that moment as well.”

The next generation of design will become less about screens and things, and more about scripts and cues.

Where design was once concerned with knowing the user, the things we’ve created now try to understand us as individuals.

(The writer Tim Wu offers an exact year when this new era began: 1979, when the Sony Walkman was introduced. “With the Walkman we can see a subtle but fundamental shift in the ideology of convenience. If the first convenience revolution promised to make life and work easier for you, the second promised to make it easier to be you. The new technologies were catalysts of selfhood. They conferred efficiency on self-expression.”)

Affirmative feedback of our worst impulses allows the fringe to feel like the center—and feeling that other people believe as you do frees you to consider things you might never have otherwise. 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. Modern user experience is becoming a black box. This is an iron law of user-friendliness: The more seamless an experience is, the more opaque it becomes. When gadgets make decisions for us, they also transform the decisions we might have made into mere opportunities to consume. A world of instantaneous, dead-simple interactions is also a world devoid of higher-order desires and intents that can’t readily be parsed in a button. While it may become easier and easier to consume things, it will become harder and harder to express what we truly need.

Good user-experience design always hinges upon making an interface well ordered, with an intuitive logic that’s easy to navigate, and making sure that interface engages you with feedback, letting you know whether you’ve done what you wanted. But even if those choices are ones that we make freely, our path to those choices is up for debate. We aren’t all just one person. We’re fickle. We have better angels and bad ones. The supposed inevitability of a design bleeds into the inevitability of the choices we are allowed to make. When data is used to mold the choices around us, then it’s reasonable to ask: Whose choices are we making? 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.

In purporting to know us better than we know ourselves, user-friendly products trap us in assumptions we can never break. We become rats in a Skinner box with only one lever to push, and so we push and push, because there is nothing else to do.

The automation paradox is that automation, which was meant to maximize what a human could do, actually worked to sap our capabilities. Automation was meant to make humans more capable, freer to focus on the complex tasks our brains are good at. The automation paradox suggests that as machines make things easier for us—as they take more friction from our daily life—they leave us less able to do things we once took for granted.

The solution to preventing human skills from withering in the face of increasing automation is to keep humans in the loop and in control at decisive moments so that their underlying skills stay honed. Resolving the user-friendly paradox will require something similar. Our machines must hew to our higher values, instead of chipping away at them through heedlessness.

The problem now is how to design for individual happiness while aiming us all toward higher ends that we can’t accomplish on our own. We can no longer assume that a better world will come merely as a by-product of making more people comfortable. Whether the problem is climate change or fake news, design must now help us make decisions based not just on what’s easy to use, but on what we should be using in the first place.

The things we make reflect the things we value. Those values can change.