In User Friendly, Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant break down the story of how user experience came to be the focus of the design world. Design doesn’t mean much without empathy and this book compellingly lays out the story of how this insight came to be upheld as truth.
Told through stories - rarely told stories and interviews with people who developed the technology and design industry, CEOs, as well as real users - this book is packed with first-hand wisdom.
Our minds are imperfect and it’s these very imperfections that make us who we are. This embrace of our limitations as humans was what led to the recognition of the idea that machines need to be moulded around us. This book lays out how the most important problems for the designers to solve are not always those that are being directly expressed by people, but instead those that people never even thought to ask themselves.
User-friendliness makes us love the products we use and is the fit between the things around us and how we behave. The authors argue that the truest material for creating new products is behaviour. Through this book we are given the vocabulary with which to express the truth that ‘design’ is far more than just prettiness, and instead can be summarised as a process of ‘industrialised empathy’.
One key insight from this book is that our expectations of machines relates to our expectations of other human beings. We want our devices to be upfront and transparent about their shortcomings, well-mannered and follow the rules of polite society.
The book explores how disability can be a powerful engine for innovation. Empathising with people at the edges of an experience and solving the problems they face can help us see past the specifics of what we know and in turn create products that end up being useful to everyone.
With the advent of AI and machine learning we’ve entered a new era of user-centred design of which we, both as consumers and designers, need to be increasingly cautious. Whereas design used to concern knowing the user, it is now the case that the products we have created try to know and understand us as individuals.
The ethical implications of the products that we now use everyday are alarming. There are startling parallels between the design of certain apps and of slot machines. Neuroscientists explain that variable rewards trigger the same dopamine circuitry in our brains as would heroin and cocaine. For example, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter all have their own variations of the pull-to-refresh gesture incorporated into the design of their notifications and the variability of whether we will get a new batch of notifications or nothing hooks us and causes our reward centres to buzz. It is undeniable that phone and app usage are changing the lives and social patterns of humans all around the world.
This book has inspired me to become a more conscious designer and participant in our current age, where our devices look to know us better than we do ourselves. User-friendliness brought about a world where an initial intent to make things that were so easy to use that there was no longer a need for instruction manuals has morphed into the practice of making products that are at best irresistible and at worst addictive for users. Since many products have been engineered to ‘hack’ our human neurology, we risk losing the autonomy of becoming anything other than what a machine’s algorithm believes we are. In claiming to understand us better than we do ourselves, products may actually be trapping us into assumptions that we cannot break and that realistically may be wrong to begin with.
The authors give us many critical insights about design and warn us about the challenges that the field will need to meet in the coming years. While digital products are infiltrating more and more aspects of our lives, the reality is that an ever-shrinking group of people are making design decisions for all of us. A proposed antidote to this is to teach more people to code. We want to avoid reaching a point in the future where we are so unable to understand how something is built that we stop using a product and instead the product starts to use us. We need to revert back to the way things were when the personal computer first arrived - when hackers, engineers and programmers would deconstruct machines themselves and then build their own that were better. We want a future where users can better customise their products around who they want to become and the kind of world that they want to live in.
Kuang, C. and Fabricant, R. (2019) User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play. United Kingdom: WH Allen.
