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User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play
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About User Friendly: How The Hidden Rules Of Design Are
Product Description AMAZON BEST BOOKS OF 2019 PICKFORTUNE WRITERS AND EDITORS' RECOMMENDED BOOKS OF 2019 PICK"User Friendly is a tour de force, an engrossing fusion of scholarly research, professional experience and revelations from intrepid firsthand reporting."―EDWARD TENNER, The New York Times Book ReviewIn User Friendly, Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant reveal the untold story of a paradigm that quietly rules our modern lives: the assumption that machines should anticipate what we need. Spanning over a century of sweeping changes, from women’s rights to the Great Depression to World War II to the rise of the digital era, this book unpacks the ways in which the world has been―and continues to be―remade according to the principles of the once-obscure discipline of user-experience design.In this essential text, Kuang and Fabricant map the hidden rules of the designed world and shed light on how those rules have caused our world to change―an underappreciated but essential history that’s pieced together for the first time. Combining the expertise and insight of a leading journalist and a pioneering designer, User Friendly provides a definitive, thoughtful, and practical perspective on a topic that has rapidly gone from arcane to urgent to inescapable. In User Friendly, Kuang and Fabricant tell the whole story for the first time―and you’ll never interact with technology the same way again. Amazon.com Review Very rarely, but sometimes, you pick up a book and realize you’ve been looking at the world all wrong. That’s what happened to me when I picked up User Friendly, a fascinating book about the history of user-experience design. The book starts off with a bang (well, almost a bang; thankfully, it wasn’t) with a discussion of the Three Mile Island disaster. As it turns out, the designers of those famous nuclear reactors used most of their brainpower to design the actual reactors and much less on designing the control room. When things started going south, people got confused—so things continued farther south. And it could have been easily avoided. User Friendly hinges on the idea that humans eventually figured out they needed to design things with humans in mind. In essence, machines needed to anticipate how humans would interact with them. As the authors trace these changes and the people behind them, from the Great Depression to WWII to the digital era, you will sense lightbulbs going off in your mind the entire way. This is a fun read, an informative read. It’s like a switch going off in your head. --Chris Schluep, Amazon Book Review Review “[An] engrossing history of how the design of commercial products and technological innovations came to be singularly focused on the user experience . . . [A]n erudite and insightful exploration of a revolution in human thinking that most people have probably never considered.”―Publishers Weekly“A readable, instructive study of the role of design in making our lives easier to live . . . Of a piece with the work of Henry Petroski or Donald Norman, Kuang and Fabricant’s book serves up plenty of useful examples and offers a few rules for would-be designers, the very first of which is 'start with the user.' A book that belongs on every designer’s shelf―and that consumers of design will enjoy, too.”―Kirkus Reviews“User Friendly weaves a stirring and unexpected story of how the machine age gave way to the iPhone era. Monolithic tools of war became chipper assistants, but at a price. Passionate and poised, Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant show us how friendliness mapped a new root structure for the simmering chaos of the recent internet.”―ALEXIS MADRIGAL, author of Powering the Dream“In this epic work, Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant offer us compulsively readable successor to The Design of Everyday Things. They have crafted a definitive narrative as well-designed as the products that grace its pages.”―BRIAN MERCHANT, author of The One Device“Digital-era design has strived to eliminate
