User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play
User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Desigbae Changing the Way We Live and Wrok Cliff Kuang Robert Fabricant Introduction: The Empire of User-Friendliness
[Harlan] Crowder [of IBM] proposed that a computer program be gauged not just on how well it solved a problem but on how easy it made the lives of the people trying to solve it. To be clear, he didn't actually invent the term. As far as he knows, it had been floating around in the air, and it was there when he needed it. ... There's a certain magic in how a few words can elide so many stories and so many ideas. This book is an attempt to paint a picture that's gone missing in plain sight. In an era in which 2.5 billion people own smartphones, user experience now occupies the center of modern life, remaking not just our digital lives but also business, society, even philanthropy. ... This book is about how the idea of user- friendliness was born and how it works. ... Many of the ideas in this book will be familiar to user- experience designers— the people who observe our lives so that they might invent new products. Part I: Easy to Use
Confusion > Three Mile Island Disaster There is a critical slip between what the men understand and what the machine is telling them. ...when you look hard enough at monumental machine disasters, you can usually find a design problem. ...You have to know why people behave as they do— and design around their foibles and limitations, rather than some ideal. One reason we find apps easy to understand even if we've never used them before is that navigability and consistency are so ingrained into the patterns of app design today. Menus all largely behave the same way; so do swipes and taps. ... There was one essential thing whose failure loomed largest at TMI, one essential thing that we demand of any gadget in our lives: feedback. 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 feedback; in the man- made world, that feedback has to be designed. When you push a button, does the button actually affect the thing it's supposed to? 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. In a previous era, we used brands to create trust— when you saw a toothpaste stamped with Colgate, you knew it was the product of a big, stable company whose long- term success depended on good products. Today, we have feedback from people who've tried out something we might like; even if you don't know them, you put your faith in there being a lot of them. One of the most significant technologies of the twenty- first century, artificial intelligence, rests on feedback: Put simply, AI and machine learning are a collection of methods that allow algorithms to gauge how well they've performed, and then tweak their own parameters until they perform better. 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. When we can't assume how a gadget works, we use feedback— in the form of trial and error— to form a hazy mental model of its logic. Feedback is what turns information into action. 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. 2. Industry
The designers who create them assume that better product design can be wielded to solve almost any problem, even those on a societal scale. ... 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. Dreyfuss turned the question from what to make and how to make it, into whom to make it for. ... He'd even ginned up a slogan: "Design is the silent salesman." ... Dreyfuss was perhaps the first American designer to articulate and then act on the idea that design wasn't just styling— it sprang from a knowledge about how things were made and what was possible. Dreyfuss described design as an act of translation between the companies that made things and the consumers who used them. ... the performance of men under duress bore no resemblance to that of those operating a demonstration model. They realized that 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. Seeing humans as they are, instead of as they're supposed to be, was one of the great, unappreciated intellectual shifts of the twentieth century. What both user- friendliness and behavioral economics shared was an overriding sense that our minds could never be perfected, and that our imperfections made us who we are. User- friendliness is simply the fit between the objects around us and the ways we behave. The truest material for making new things isn't aluminum or carbon fiber. It's behavior. 4. Trust
The magic of a well- designed invention is that you seem to know how it will work even before you've used it. As his frequent collaborator Byron Reeves told The New York Times, "Everybody thought [computers] were tools, that they were hammers and screwdrivers and things to be looked at in an inanimate fashion. Cliff said, 'No, these things talk, they have relationships with you, and they make you feel good or bad.'" 11 Grice's 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 not enough to make a dashboard just easy to use or easy to read. And while we don't need a dashboard with a full- blown personality, it'll have to have personality traits. It'll need to be calming, communicative, or helpful, as the situation demands. If you do have a smart speaker, it's probably the most expensive kitchen timer you've ever bought— and it remains only that, because whatever else it might do is difficult to discover and impossible to remember. Don Norman is probably most famous among designers for popularizing the idea of an affordance— physical details, designed in products, that tell us how they're to be used, such as the subtle curve of a door handle that tells you which way to pull, 5. Metaphor
The design theorist Klaus Krippendorff writes, "Metaphors die in repeated use but leave behind the reality that they had languaged into being.") ... that metaphors provide us a web of inferences, which we use to explain the underlying logic of how something should work. ... If time is like money, then, just like money, it can be saved or invested wisely; it can be wasted or stolen or borrowed. 9 ... The right metaphor is like an instruction manual but better, because it teaches you how something should work without you ever having to be told. faithful mimicry of how the physical world behaved would make the digital world somehow easier to understand— and even magical, if that mimicry was nuanced enough. Amazon's 1- Click would easily be the single most consequential button ever invented, but for the Facebook Like button. ... That's how metaphors work: Once their underlying logic becomes manifest, we forget that they were ever there. No one remembers that before the steering wheel in a car, there were tillers, and that tillers made for a natural comparison when no one drove cars and far more people had piloted a boat. ... Designers still scour the world for metaphors that relate not just to how we understand a product, but how we feel when we use it. ... This is almost a universal practice in design, creating mood boards to summon how something should look and feel, and then trying to translate those into form- giving metaphors and words. ... personification is just one of the ways designers use metaphors to create beauty. Part II: Easy to Want
6. Empathy
Design thinking, "user- centered design," and user experience are all forms of industrialized empathy. ... the best students didn't demonstrate creativity in solving a problem so much as in finding the problem. ... the discrepancy between how people were supposed to use things and how they actually used them." ... In addition to creating a culture in which the entire staff became students of human behavior, there were two more ingredients in IDEO's way of working: putting prototypes, no matter how primitive, in front of users as quickly as possible, and the idea that the design process didn't lie with any one "designer." To create a design that worked, you had to build it, watch it fail while people tried to use it, fix it, then watch it fail again until you finally had something. ... All these processes are subsumed in a larger, ubiquitous framework— observe, prototype, test, and repeat— that equates observation with creation. Influence spread only because IDEO created the vocabulary that others could use to sell the idea that "design" wasn't just prettiness. Rather, it was a process of industrialized empathy— one that could be marketed, explained, circulated, repeated, and then spread. Even if a disproportionate number of inventions begin with someone's personal sense of a problem, most inventions aren't perfected by their creator but rather by other people who finally understood a problem after someone else inspired them. 7. Humanity
But Capital One also discovered that if Eno had some sense of humor and could talk to people about other things besides banking, people would use it more. ... balance. "You would be surprised how delighted people are when they can extend the conversation beyond a functional- use case," said Audra Koklys, Capital One's head ... "We actually designed character flaws because we found that's how people connect with characters." 8. Personalization
Movies might seem like Disney's core business, but they are really marketing vehicles. Most of the company's billions come from turning movie hits into franchises: first with toys and TV shows, then with theme- park rides that imprint kids anew, powering sequels and selling more toys. Today, we are surrounded more and more by technology like this, meant to serve us without our ever having to ask or even to push a button. ... few years later, looking up at those tiles. 6 The park couldn't have been built without an abiding faith in a user- friendly world where commerce was social progress, and better design meant a better life. Hyperpersonalization. As the gadgets around us become more and more capable, they'll need to become more polite, more socially aware. They'll need to adopt better etiquette, and to do that, they'll need to model our mores better. ... When technology gets laced into the fabric of everything, what we demand is that those technologies hew closer to our social mores and the expectations of polite society. 9. Peril
Of course, almost no one had consciously thought to create a world of Skinner- inspired addictiveness. But that only makes the creation more profound. Designers evolved these solutions because, in a quest for what got users to come back more and more often, they stumbled upon what we cannot resist. But a mix of ambition, intuition, ingenuity, and greed rediscovered one of the intractable facets of our brain chemistry. The most enduring businesses in the world have always been built upon addiction— alcohol, tobacco, drugs. The trick of the user- friendly world is that not only are we addicted, the drug doesn't have to be bought. The drug lies in our own brains, hardwired there by evolution. Making things easier to use morphed into making them usable without a second thought. That ease eventually morphed into making products more irresistible, even outright addicting. For a brief period in Silicon Valley, that search for addictiveness seemed harmless— partly because addiction itself was usually framed as "engagement," a Silicon Valley byword for having users constantly coming back for more. ... Today, Skinner's blind focus on whatever goads an animal into action has been transformed, thanks to technology platforms, into a presumption that what users want can be reduced to what makes them click. ... omits motive in favor of impulse and action. Alan Cooper, the eminent user- experience designer who came up with the idea of user personas, "Facebook's most consequential impact may be in amplifying the universal tendency toward tribalism. Posts dividing the world into 'us' and 'them' rise naturally, tapping into users' desire to belong. ... Moreover, on the street, people might think awful things, but they're held in check by the rhythms and mores of the commons. Society, after all, is built to encourage some behaviors while tamping down others— to foster certain types of communities while holding others in check. That is society's most basic function. Facebook, by contrast, makes it easy to say awful things in public. Kosinski had shown that if you knew a person's Facebook likes, you knew their personality. ...And if you knew their personality, then you could readily tailor messages to them— based on what made them angry or scared or motivated or lonely. ... Kosinski's work had proved in startling fashion that Facebook's advertisers didn't have to rely on crude demographic targeting. Instead, with the mere rudiments of Facebook's data, they could target people based on their specific personalities: how a particular person reacted to messages of fear or hope or generosity or greed. ... Facebook may be harmful precisely because it allows people we don't know, with motives we cannot track, to predict exactly who we are. ... 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. ... The more seamless an experience is, the more opaque it becomes. 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. user- friendly products trap us in assumptions we can never break. ... when digital products have greater and greater reach, it means fewer and fewer people are making the decisions. ... 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. ... As gadgets get easier to use, they become more mysterious; they make us more capable of doing what we want, while also making us more feeble in deciding whether what we seem to want is actually worth doing. ... Designers now have to confront the alarming possibility that user- friendliness helps us avoid consequences by abstracting away any downstream impacts. ... the user- experience designer Alan Cooper has called for something he calls "ancestor thinking" in design: a consideration not just of whether a product works, but what its implications are. ... a new way of working that privileges the future over the present, 10. Promise
The ease of readapting user- friendly patterns is the single biggest reason that design now dwells in so many places we wouldn't expect. ... we know what usability means— it's feedback, mental models, ... creating the incentives and feedback loops ... social networking was the product of a generation of latchkey kids who grew up isolated in the suburbs; ... when a designer creates something new, she is giving form to a thought that allows other people to become more than they were. ... The next phase in user experience will be to change our founding metaphors so that we can express our higher needs, not just our immediate preferences. As the acclaimed Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa— an early IDEO employee— eloquently put it, the best designs "dissolve into behavior" so that they become invisible rather than stand out for their artistry. 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. ... we are highly trained tinkerers, with a robust set of prototyping skills that make up for our lack of formal credentials. What does it feel like to follow a user- centered design process, step- by- step? 1. Start with the User individual needs often diverge quickly once you start observing what people actually do. ... Once you identify an interesting group of people to learn from, you have to meet them on their own terms. ... why you should always meet users on their turf, and why you should also conduct research in a way that puts them in the lead. They should be the guide to their own world. ... Designers have developed a number of clever techniques to open up fresh windows into users' lives. For example, you might try asking someone to unpack their handbag, backpack, or satchel while narrating the reasons they choose to keep certain objects with them at all times— ... we use these techniques not to learn about the objects themselves (though that can be interesting) but to get at the deeper motivations behind people's choices, particularly their habitual ones. 2. Walk in the User's Shoes "The critical component is to not just notice what people are doing, but to really try to understand what's driving it," 3. Make the Invisible Visible ... feedback surrounds us every moment of every day, helping us to make sense of the user- friendly world. If feedback is well designed, we generally take it for granted. ... Feedback is the fundamental language of user- friendly design. But the big challenge with designing feedback is figuring out when and where to provide it. Many designers I know are fond of a technique called "Wizard of Oz," in which we use smoke and mirrors to simulate the behavior of a smart system to see if it makes sense to users long before our clients invest in building it. "Treat your competitors as your first prototypes." 4. Build on Existing Behavior behaviors we can observe in the world today— even if they might seem pretty unusual at first— rather than potential future behaviors dreamed up by marketing executives. ... Users tend to be surprised when you show interest in their work- arounds and mental assists, but they are invaluable sources of insight. The job of the designer is to surface these mental models so that products can be better tuned to user expectations and easier to integrate into our lives. ... ask the user to sketch the way something works from memory. ... ask the user to draw and label the various options and choices from memory so that you can get a deeper window into their understanding ... then ask the users to narrate the steps they go through to complete a simple task (something designers call a "think- aloud"). And I ask the users to narrate a series of actions, the ones they are accustomed to as well as ones they might not have tried, ... Exercises like these can reveal the limits of the mental model the user has constructed for how and why something works the way it