Book Sips #50 — ‘User Friendly’ by Cliff Kuang with Robert Fabricant

Published in

PM Library

3 min readFeb 12, 2021

I
n full honesty, it’s been a while since I don’t read such a good book about the current state of design and how we got here. It can fairly be considered the successor of the classic ’The Design of Everyday Things’ without exaggerating. It’s been an absolute pleasure (and a great learning journey!) to go through this guy. Plus, even though I’m not a hardcover fan, I have to admit the relief on the cover touches it with a fantastic appearance.

‘User Friendly: How the hidden rules of design are changing the way we live, work, and play’ is definitely a must-read for designers. The award winning-journalist Cliff Kuang with Robert Fabricant put together the history of today’s ubiquitous user-friendly world. Going through the different steps from which the field of design evolved, the book is enriched with many excerpts of interviews to field eminences (from the very one Don Norman to IDEO, Disney, and Apple key members). Designers! Make yourself a favor and read this masterpiece. A sip:

“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. Modern user experience is becoming a black box. This is an iron law of user-friendliness: The more seamless an experience is, the more opaque it becomes. When gadgets make decisions for us, they also transform the decisions we might have made into mere opportunities to consume. A world of instantaneous, dead-simple interactions is also a world devoid of hire-order desires and intents that can’t readily be parsed in a button. While it might become easier and easier to consume things, it will become harder and harder to express what we truly need.”