Author: Cliff Kuang
Disasters always mirror the way things should work.
feedback is what turns any man-made creation into an object that you relate to, one that might evoke feelings of ease or ire, satisfaction or frustration.
Imagine if carbon emissions had no other effects than they do now, but that carbon accumulation turned the sky from blue to green. In a world like that, it’s hard to believe that we’d still be arguing about whether mankind was having an effect on the climate. We might
Until the worst has happened, there is no feedback about what the effects of our actions are, and by then it’s too late.
Today, buyer/seller feedback is what has made us comfortable with the online economy
self-conscious users, because they posted less and less, would drift ever so slightly away from the app.
Instagram ruthlessly adopted Snapchat’s feedback philosophy, inserting a strip of “stories” at the top of the app, which let users share photos without the possibility of getting likes, and with the only way of replying being to send a direct message.
It is a strange kind of world we live in, where to make sure that men make no mayhem with a machine, they’re made to behave like buttons.
Dreyfuss built his career on the faith that there was an underlying logic to what people wanted.
If good designs are not available for the man in the street, the system which produces these designs must be undemocratic and wrong.”
Designers, by aligning consumer design with business incentives, thus became high priests of the faith that better goods meant better lives all around.
It took almost a century of progress to find the “user” in “user friendly,” and that journey was advanced by war. Only with such high stakes could a radically different
Only with such high stakes could a radically different paradigm—of fitting the machine to the man—take hold so quickly.
It took almost a century of progress to find the “user” in “user friendly,” and that journey was advanced by war. Only with such high stakes could a radically different paradigm—of fitting the machine to the man—take hold so quickly.
Her team eventually produced the Venus Snap, a women’s razor that doesn’t have a handle. Instead, there’s a tab about the size of a half dollar with grippy rubber
“Beauty” is the word we use when a designer’s vision overlaps with our own.
There were always two competing strands of thought. On one hand, the ideal of making people’s lives better by solving their problems; on the other, the drive to simply stoke consumer lust and keep the furnace of capitalism well fed.
Moggridge realized that the software wasn’t a thing separate from the laptop. It was all the same experience, one big web of interactions.
The explicit need versus the latent need. People will usually tell you what they want, but not what they need.”
Engelbart, instead, saw machines as tools built to serve.
Minsky imagined what the machine could become as something outside ourselves, perhaps beyond us.
“That film helped solidify for us that human-to-human interaction should be the metaphor for design.”
Disability is so often an engine of innovation, simply because humans will invent ways to satisfy their needs,
“We’re reframing disability as an opportunity.”
“Our capabilities are always changing.”
The utility is so obvious that consent has simply been assumed.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” he told me.
Casinos comp you drinks and shows when you lose.
Turning a negative experience into a positive one. That’s why casinos comp you drinks and shows when you lose.
As studies have shown, innovation labs usually fail not because of a lack of ideas but because at some point those new ideas require new ways of working.
Companies shunting hard decisions onto their users, asking them to figure out what the company couldn’t figure out for itself. Within the trade, this is often described as “shipping your org chart.”
The point is, we’re still figuring out how much to share about what we know of someone else—even while all of us on social media know the data is already public. As we’re
You might chitchat with colleagues and ask them where they went to college, even though you know where they went, because they’re always popping up as a suggested connection on LinkedIn.
When things don’t turn out like we expect, our brains catch fire. Alert to the chance of gleaning a new pattern, our reward centers buzz. It’s the same dopamine circuitry triggered
He codified the principles in just three elements: motivation, trigger, and ability. Create a motivation, no matter how silly or trivial. Provide a trigger that lets a user sate that motivation. Then make it easy to act upon it.
Uber calls “forward dispatch,” that queues up the next drive before the present one has ended—much like Netflix queues up the next episode of a series. “It
Lies spread far better than truth, because a lie that we can believe in is so much easier to share than a truth that requires another click to discern.
And because its algorithm unintentionally privileges negativity, the greatest rush comes by attacking outsiders: The other sports team. The other political party. The ethnic minority.”
“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. Its gamelike
Interface rewards engagement, delivering a dopamine boost when users accrue likes and responses, training users to indulge behaviors that win affirmation. And because its algorithm unintentionally privileges negativity, the greatest rush comes by attacking outsiders: The other sports team. The other political party. The ethnic minority.”33 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. Unlike in the commons, such extremity is rewarded with likes. People can realize, thanks to a feedback mechanism that never existed before, that there are others just like themselves. The signal gets reinforced. By that mechanism, what might have been a fringe opinion expressed under one’s breath can then harden into a worldview typed out in all caps.
But as our machines have become more elegant, our ability to alter them hasn’t nearly kept pace.
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.
By fulfilling the lower-level desires, we became freed to contemplate the higher ones.
Hegelian dialectic—the idea that society creates a thesis that’s met with a reaction, then an antithesis that amends that prior paradigm, and finally a synthesis, which resolves the tension between the two.
Tibbets wants to turn companies into mere verbs in a sentence that people write for themselves.
Brad Smith, the CEO of Intuit, has become a vocal advocate for emotional design, which may be surprising given that his company is best known for tax-preparation software. Adopting a user-friendly approach to research, his team at Intuit discovered a great
These letters is that user-friendly design is about much more than usability.
The feedback cycle between designer and user is the beating heart of the user-friendly world.