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

by Cliff Kuang

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.