User friendly: The book

User friendly: The book

At first, “User Friendly: how the hidden rules of design are changing the way we live, work, and play,” by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant, might seem like a technical book that would only interest designers and developers. However, I believe that everyone should know a little about how the objects we use in our daily lives have evolved from a user-friendly perspective.

Let’s start with the idea of “user friendly”. The American programmer Harlan Crowder, from IBM, was one of the first people to use this term to refer to a computer back in the 1960s.

He couldn’t accept the tedious process of punching cards (I’ve done that a lot when I was an engineering student) and waiting for the mainframe to process the code for hours, only to find out it all went wrong because of a forgotten comma or symbol.

In this sense, “user friendly” means that the use of a particular equipment is simple, intuitive, friendly, accessible to anyone, and robust in case of operator error.

The authors, Cliff Kuang, an award-winning journalist specialized in User Experience and editor of the largest and most important design magazines in the United States, and Robert Fabricant, former creative director of the legendary Frog Design, recount how it all began and why people started to realize the importance of taking this matter seriously.

Of course, intuitively, there were professionals already thinking about this issue, especially industrial designers who emerged after World War I, like Henry Dreyfuss, responsible for designing a significant number of consumer products from the 1930s in the USA. He understood that things, more than being beautiful, should be easy to clean and intuitive to use.

Feedback

Kuang and Fabricant recount that the most significant influence for this approach came from very serious accidents, such as the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in 1979 and the deaths of dozens of pilots during World War II.

In the case of the power plant, operators lacked feedback on what was happening. For example, they would press a button to open a valve, but they didn’t receive confirmation that it had actually opened. Additionally, all the instruments were mixed up, making visualization difficult.

As for the pilots, they made mistakes because the control panel was also poorly designed.

My father was an airplane mechanic, and I remember him always saying that this was the safest means of transportation, and accidents only occurred due to human error. I used to repeat the same speech during the years I worked as an engineer, until I started studying design more in depth.

The technical people had gotten used to blaming humans when the real problem was poor design.

During that time, researchers even attempted to classify pilots who made mistakes as a class of people prone to that kind of behavior.

The idea was to find special individuals with the appropriate profile. Only later did they realize that it was much smarter to redesign the interfaces to fit the way humans think, not the other way around, giving rise to a discipline called ergonomics.

The principle was that machines should be easy to operate because that would also enhance human performance.

One of the first professionals to address this issue was the engineer and cognitive scientist Donald Norman, who, incidentally, coined the term “User Experience,”* which went beyond ergonomics, as it considered psychological aspects, not just functional ones.

The idea was to understand why errors occurred, how humans thought and felt, and how machines could be shaped considering this environment and behavior.

This line of thinking eventually gave rise to other specialized areas of knowledge, such as behavioral economics, which is concerned with making machines user-friendly while acknowledging that our minds will never be perfect.

Moreover, it is precisely our imperfections that make us who we are, and we must learn to live with them.

So, designing in a user-friendly way means adapting the objects around us to how we behave. Design is no longer based solely on artifacts but on patterns of behavior.

All the intricacies of designing new products can be reduced to two fundamental strategies:

1. Identify the causes of our pains and try to eliminate them; or

2. Reinforce what we already do with a new object in a way that is so easy that it becomes second nature.

Metaphors

Another crucial aspect highlighted by the authors is the importance of metaphors. According to linguist George Lakoff, in collaboration with philosopher Mark Johnson, it is nearly impossible to think without resorting to metaphors because they are our most basic mental model of the real world.

Think about the inbox messages (closed and protected, needing your attention to exist) and the feed (like food), or stream (flow), a conveyor belt of food that keeps going even if you’re not paying attention.

An essential example of a metaphor is the dashboard of the Ford Fusion hybrid car. The driver needed to pay attention to the battery level and whether the car was charging properly. So, when they applied the brakes and the battery charged through kinetic force, the dashboard emphasized the action.

However, this led drivers to brake frequently and abruptly, thinking they were charging the battery (but real efficiency only increased with gentle braking).

How could this be explained intuitively, without a video or manual?

You can also watch the video above in this link.

One idea was for the onboard computer to scold the imprudent driver. But who likes to be scolded, especially by a machine? Also, considering the culture, driving a car means having control; having a machine give advice would be a real mood spoiler.

The solution was to use the color green to indicate that the driver was driving well, meaning they were using resources efficiently (driving at a productive speed and braking smoothly).

After extensive research, the developers decided to use the metaphor of green leaves (ecology). When the trip was efficient, digital green leaves fell onto the dashboard. When it wasn’t, the leaves disappeared, indicating that the driver wasn’t contributing to the environment’s preservation.

The result was incredible; people stopped taking short trips that could be done on foot because they felt guilty “killing” green leaves… even children began to pay attention to how their parents were driving.

One lesson about metaphors is that people will only understand them if they care about the subject. Those who buy electric or hybrid cars theoretically care about it, at least.

Metaphors can save lives, as seen in the case of the defibrillator designed by IDEO in the 1990s; any layperson could use it since it only had three described steps and a button next to each, indicating the correct sequence.

Desktop

We almost don’t pay attention anymore, but one of the most significant factors, besides the invention of the mouse, for the popularization of computers was the metaphor of the desktop, with its folders, trash bin, agenda, and more.

You can also watch the video above in this link.

Once the computer object became familiar, the elements no longer needed to be so literal from a graphical point of view; they became more stylized. When Apple implemented the drag-and-drop function to move a file or photo, even children could intuitively use it.

Amazon’s 1-Click button is one of the biggest revolutions in e-commerce history. Its impact on the Internet is only second to Facebook’s Like button.

Metaphors are so fundamental that the attempts by major companies like Facebook to provide accessible internet for the entire planet have failed because people in underdeveloped countries with lower education levels do not understand what the internet is. Many people think that the Internet and Facebook are the same thing (I’ve personally heard of some cases), and therefore, they do not take full advantage of the tool.

Empathy and Humanity

Without stepping into the user’s shoes, there’s no way to design something that excites, motivates, and is intuitive for them.

That’s why the authors claim that user-centered design is nothing but industrialized empathy.

They go even further and state that we are better at solving a problem when it is interesting and challenging. Empathy is the key to this because the most interesting problems are not obvious.

They share the story of a student who went to work for a British government agency. Her mission was to find out why so much money was being spent on people injured by lawnmowers. She delved so deeply into the issue that she discovered the real problem lay in the design of the lawnmowers.

People became distracted while mowing the lawn because it wasn’t a task that required much attention. As a result, they accidentally ran the lawnmower over their own feet, causing serious accidents. Smartly, she reached out to the manufacturers to suggest improvements, but no one took her seriously (after all, the cost wasn’t their burden, and remember, for a long time, the blame was always put on the feeble-minded human).

In the end, she ended up at one of the most renowned design studios in the world, IDEO. This company, in addition to the design thinking method, was also responsible for developing the mouse for Apple.

Conclusions

In addition to great stories, many tips, and curiosities, the book also includes an appendix with a summary of the history of User Friendly, starting in 1716 when Louis XV decided to add arms to the throne’s chair to make it more comfortable.

In a way, this also contributed to the visual projection of power and privilege. It goes on to mention the invention of the steering wheel for better car control in 1898, the Kodak cameras where you just had to press a button and it did the rest (1900).

There’s also the involvement of Disneyland, emojis, Alexa, among many other articles, books, objects, inventions, movies, and applications. It concludes with the General Data Protection Regulation implemented by the European Union in 2016.

I recommend this read for everyone. Nothing to lose, everything to gain.

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*The authors don’t mention it, but there is controversy about whether Norman is actually the original author of the term. In any case, he was the one who made the term widely popular.