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

by Cliff Kuang

The easy and the simple are not identical. To discover what is really simple and to act upon the discovery is an exceedingly difficult task. —John Dewey,

I have always viewed my environment through user-friendly eyes, constantly aware of how things could be made to work better for people and better reflect their values. I

As a designer, I want to work on every piece of a puzzle, not just one part, whether it’s the keypad, touchscreen, or store layout.

the success of our work was not to be found in the beauty of the result, but rather in observing how it fit into and supported people’s actual behavior.

“good design” turns out not to depend on any singular talent. Instead, it can only be found in the way people react and respond to a design.

designers must accept the consequences of their work in the world, not just the intentions that went into designing them or the beauty of the result.

“The critical component is to not just notice what people are doing, but to really try to understand what’s driving it,”

It turns out that appropriate feedback is a harder design problem to solve than you think, and we are all intuitively aware when it misses the mark.

“Treat your competitors as your first prototypes.” Take advantage of all the effort that some designers have put into their work and learn from it. This is a great way to understand the choices that various designers have made when faced with the exact same challenge: designing feedback.

I often encourage the designers I work with to observe a situation as if they were cinematographers, zooming in and out from small details (the way someone folds a napkin or splits the check) to the larger scene as it unfolds around them (the flow of people, particularly those who manage and run the restaurant), looking for patterns that emerge at each level. What objects are people using? Where do they seem completely confident and engaged versus hesitant or frustrated? Where do groups gather and why? I instruct my teams to make careful note of what is surprising or confusing. Patterns of behavior will emerge naturally.

The key is to consider users who have an outsized or pronounced need that would require them to develop behaviors outside the norm. Underlying this approach is yet another key principle of user-friendly design: Today’s niche markets will become tomorrow’s mass markets. Small investments in studying the behavior of outliers today can drive future adoption on a large scale.

People will often apologize for their hacks as if they are a sign of weakness, a gap in their own abilities, rather than a resourceful way to make their world a bit more accommodating. Users tend to be surprised when you show interest in their work-arounds and mental assists, but they are invaluable sources of insight. They might even help a designer identify a major gap in the current experience that can be filled by a whole new product or service

How do designers anticipate and plan ahead to create satisfying experiences across a product journey that could last years or decades,

User experience should support the entire user journey, not just a single moment or interaction.13 Consider everything that happens between reserving a hotel room online and touching your head on the pillow, then checking out a few days later. Each step should be interlinked through a series of feedback loops that propel you forward, like a daisy chain, while providing a consistent feeling of comfort, confidence, and ease. Even successful consumer-driven companies such as Marriott and Disney can find it difficult to step back and look objectively from the customer’s point of view across every step of their journey, given how their businesses are typically organized into functional silos such as marketing, product management, and customer support, and channels like retail and digital. It is always an eye-opening experience when you map out in detail all the different hoops that the average user must jump through. These blind spots can be a huge barrier to an effective user-friendly experience,

One of the most important issues we try to address as designers is when the user’s journey actually starts and ends. This is not always obvious. Your client might assume that it all starts when the customer walks into their store or opens their app, when in fact there might be many factors, and earlier experiences, that shape the user experience long before any direct point of engagement. These neglected spaces—before, between, or after direct product touch-points—are often the best design opportunities, as they can be strengthened with feedback to better connect the dots across the entire journey in unexpected and often delightful ways. Sometimes user journeys can extend across many

Our job as designers is not just to make things work better so that users can get on with their lives. It is to surprise, delight, and build a meaningful relationship over time.

functionality isn’t enough anymore. We have to build emotion into the product.”

“the behavior you are seeing is the behavior you designed for.”

Instead of trying to tease apart a web of conflicting information, they systematically close down branches of possibility. The procedure is meant to immerse them in what is going on now, rather than what usually goes right.