User Friendly Book Notes

I came across this book as I was looking up different references for approaching the design phase for my first product with DSHS. Feel free to take a look at some of the notes I gathered from the above reading. Please give all due credit to the original authors!

User Friendly

By: cliff kuang with

Robert fabricant

Introduction: the empire of user friendliness

> this book is about how User Friendliness was born and how it works

> I hope you'll come away from this book understanding how the world is being remade every single day: the ideals, Priciples, and assumptions that lie behind the taps and swipes you take for granted

Part 1: easy to use

Chapter 1: confusion

> one reason we find apps easy to understand even if we've never used them before is that navigatability and consistency are so ingrained into the patterns of app design today

> when something works well enough for you to predict what it'll do next, you eventually form a *mental model* of it

> there was one thing whose failure loomed the largest at the three mile island nuclear facility, the lack of feedback. It's the feedback that respond to the actions you take (think, underlined incorrect spelling in MS Word, or not letting progression in a form of you forgot to fill in a required field)

> there may be no greater design challenge than creating better, tighter feedback loops in places where they don't exist, be they in the environment, health care, or government.

> the "like" button of Facebook offered a new way to send and receive affirmation, and in so doing, it rewired the social fabric of one-third of the world

> when feedback is tied not merely to the easy machines work but instead to the things we value most - our social circles, or self image - it can become the map by which we chart our lives (facebook, instagram, snapchat). 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.

> we just expect things to work. Almost all of design stems from making sure that a user can figure out what to do, and can tell what's going on. The beauty and difficulty lies in what happens when the object is new, but needs to feel familiar so that it's newness isn't baffling

> there's a psychology to design, but there's also an art to it, and a culture, too. Design presumes that we can make objects humane, but doing so requires a different way of seeing the world.

Chapter 2: industry

> designer's way of seeing the world: if our better selves are within reach, then we'll be better people

> by understanding what other people think and feel, you could make their life better by reaching past the obvious problem and into the problem they couldn't quite articulate. Turn problems from "what" and "how" to make it, into "whom" to make it for

> take boring things and view them from the lens of: seeing a great landscape of terrible junk that no one else has tried to dignify through thoughtfulness (dreyfus)

> bach: good design is the Manifest destiny of market societies

> improving household tools: it wasn't enough to make them cheaper, rather, things had to be made more desirable, as well

> designers, by aligning consumer design with business incentives, thus became high priests of the faith that better goods meant better lives all around. (Dreyfus made the handles of a fly swatter feel like a pistol grip - turning the chore into a game)

> research: to create tractors for John Deere, drayfus learned to drive a combine and played at being a farmer. To create sewing machines, he took sewing classes along side the ladies. This was the pre-cursor to "human- centered design"

Chapter 3: error

> see Chapanis during WW2 coining of the term "designer error". Chapanis ensures instruments and controls in planes were put in standard positions, and he also made sure controls moved in "natural" directions.

> ergonomics: the idea that machines should be simple to use - so simple even that they're universal

> Dreyfuss intuited what last behind a new paradigm: that the artifacts on or lives can't make us happy unless they're designed to serve us, with our limitations, foibles, and errors.

> the embrace of human limitation was nursemaid to the idea that machines had to be bent around humans

> the most true material for making new things isn't aluminum or carbon fiber.?It's behavior

Chapter 4: Trust

> we come to trust machines (especially autopilot cars) only if they mimic the way we come to trust people

> Lathrop while first designing self-driving cars at VW: he knew that 90% of plane crashes occurred not when the plane broke down but when the pilot failed to understand what the plane was doing

> Lathrop 3+1 principle for autonomous machines

1. Need to have an easy indicator of the car's mode (in autopilot or not in autopilot)

2. Coffee spilling principle: not getting surprised about what's happening

3. We need to see what the car is seeing

+1. We need perfectly clear transitions when a car takes control and when it releases control

> Clifford Nass: humans expect computers to act as though they were people and they get annoyed when technology fails to respond in socially appropriate ways

> we aspire to make our interactions with machines as concise as possible, available at the push of a button... but what if a machine could determine your sense of control by sensing your behavior - then the press of a button world start to feel like unnecessary work

> machines must be designed so that our imaginations can't get too far ahead of the machines (tesla "autopilot" giving over confidence to its drivers). When they do, confusion reigns - but companies typically blame it on user error, because it's easier to

> where Lathrop was focused on figuring out how the car could sense whether you were paying attention abs then to take control when you weren't, Saproo wanted the car to behave like a polite butler to whom you paid a lot of money to anticipate your whims without you ever having to lift your finger

Chapter 5: metaphor

> metaphors strip away what's specialized and complex, focusing or attention on just the few things we need to make sense of something, the ideas we share

> apple's rise is nothing more or less than the story of three interfaces: Macintosh OS, the Ipod click wheel, and the iPhone touchscreen

> embodied metaphors - Questionnaire metaphor: those assigned to take questionnaire often while using a heavier clipboard offer more serious answers to?the questions. Physical Heaviness serves as a sub-concious reinforcement and manifestation of the task to answer questions more deeply

> universal practice in design: create a mood board to summon how something should look and feel, and then translating those into form-giving metaphors abs words

> in a user friendly world, beauty is a tool that transforms something that's easy to used into something we Want to use.

Part 2: Easy to Want

Chapter 6: Empathy

> Ford Edsel: the biggest car flop of all time. Designed to capture all the features "people wanted" in a car, but turned out not to be a big seller. - just because customers say they want something in a survey, doesn't necessarily mean they actually want it

> industrialized Empathy: is a combination of user-centered design and user-experience.

> throughout the 1960s, McKim (Stanford Engineering professor) recognized the best students didn't demonstrate creativity in solving problems so much as in finding the problems themselves. Kelley, one of McKim'a students (and the designer of the first computer mouse for Apple) recognized that finding interesting problems is even more important than finding interesting solutions

> often, average people in the confines of their own homes don't resemble as professionals, they don't follow instructions, they let their minds wander, they make assumptions about their tools and how they should behave (Fulton suri)... so designers need to be in the room with decision makers,?to let them know not to color a chain saw a certain way to avoid the confusion of kids thinking the color means it's a miss toy

> IDEO (deign company methodology) observe, prototype, test, repeat:

1. train Designers to be students of human behavior (to recognize their needs, not just what they tell you that they want),

2. Prototyping as quickly as possible. Using whatever you have: peices of paper, cardboard, and eventually the actual product materials

3. The design process doesn't lay on one "designer" - Radical process and communications transparency is needed

4. Failing fast is good

> today, Suri's insistence on rooting design and innovation in the nuance of individual experience has become the maxim that if you design for everyone, you design for no one.

> "it's not the consumer's job to figure out what he or she wants" (Steve jobs) also... "if I had asked people what they wanted at the time, they would have said faster horses- rather than cars" (Henry Ford apocryphal)

> design thinking arrived to fill the gap between companies pressed to create new things and people with needs but without the opportunities to bet their time and money in creating something new. - we can all innovate, if we first know how to empathize.

Chapter 7: Humanity

> "... what do you want a computer to do? And you realize you want it to be like a friend. You input the parameters of a problem and they help you solve it, not unlike a psychiatrist or a good listener" (Barret, director of "Her")

> technologists want technology to be so useful that it becomes invisible. The way to do this is to make it more humane

> by learning how the often overlooked and disabled, ranging from arthritic to to dyslexic or deaf, pick their way through the world many of us navigate with little trouble, the hope is that one could actually build better products for everyone else

> both Ripple and Aeron were examples of people finding bigger solutions by trying to solve harder, more specialized problems- and then stumbling into something much more universal

> that's what it means for the world to be better designed, the problems get harder to define - which means we will need to continue to develop new frames of reference in order to see them

Chapter 8: Personalization

> Disney "Magic Band" (designed by John Padgett): the technology appeared to work inside people, which could eliminate even the slightest wait people may have encountered previously at the amusement parks. Disney world turned a high-tech surveillance operation into a delight

> no matter how often we say we're creeped out by technology, we acclimate surprisingly quickly if it anticipates what we want

> when crafting experiences like Disney World, the seems these companies are striving to hide still persist, because they reflect how the companies are built: the groups inside them are fighting for control, and those elements might chip away at the experience until it's dust

> Disney Imagineers vs the Operations Division: the Imagineers created the attractions, the operations division saw the park with x-ray vision, and oversaw the bones holding everything together. The problems at Disney often result from improperly assigning accountability over which department is accountable to a particular task - which has resulted in the Disney magic band still not having lived up to its full potential

> "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable fun magic. If we can get out of the way, our guests create more memories" (Arthur c. Clarke)

> Personalization: at Disney, it's moving from "hey, look at that talking bird" to "hey, that talking bird is taking directly to me"

> 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.

> ***the single greatest challenge of the user- friendly world: how to create one coherent face to the user, when the company behind the face is really a federation, atomized in order to make the work efficient

> John Padgett's goal for the wristband (which he got the idea from a magnet band from a Sky Mall magazine) was: to make the experience frictionless for the customer, while also making that customer feel as if they were the only person in the world that mattered

> FOMO: "fear of missing out" is the kind of motivation customers should experience when deciding on using a service or not

> Personalization: gives us exactly what we want while we spend as little energy as possible on making a decision

> idea: popup "everything restaurant" - its like having delivery to your home, but also having a night in the town. where all it is is a covered seating area in the middle of a restaurant heavy area. People gather at the table and order food from any of the restaurants in the vicinity. The "waiters" bring the food to their table from any of the partnering restaurants. This way, the guests don't have to choose a single place, but can ask gather.

Chapter 9: Peril

> variable rewards: people spend more money in casinos than movies, sporting events, and theme parks combined. People tend to get more excited talking about winning a lottery scratch-off than going to a baseball game that they paid for. Society cheers for the underdog because they challenge preconceived notions.

> once you know how to push people's buttons, you can play them like a piano (Tristan harris)

> Getting a match on time is programed variability that gives people that "rush" when they find out that "match" happened. Same for "refreshing" the Facebook screen to see how many "likes" a person's post received

> "skinner boxes" are personal slot machines where you perform one action (pulling the lever) to see an outcome (winning the lottery)

> *** training: for people to perform better, they shouldn't have to be trained more, the machine/process need to be created around them so that they need to be trained LESS.

> what makes a successful application: motivation, trigger, ability. Create a motivation, no matter how silly it trivial. Provide a trigger that lets the user state that motivation. Then make it easy to act upon it. (Read Fogg's book "hooked")?

> forward dispatch: in uber, the next trip is scheduled before the driver fishes the one they are on, to get them to continue working. On snapchat, users are rewarded for keeping a streak going in conversation. (Could stores like Abercrombie make more money by charging frequent customers a fraction of the price for their clothes due to their loyalty?) Netflix purposely makes it more difficult to stop a show from continuing on to the next episode when you're binge watching.

> Facebook "likes" negative repercussions: it reinforces the fringe opinions of some held in secret to ALL CAPS posts that are then shared amongst others so easily within their tribe. It allows those in the fringe to feel like they are at the center- and when you feel others feel the same as you do, it frees you to consider actions you may never have otherwise.

> the ease of user-friendly design empowers is to become the worst versions of ourselves. It makes starting a fire as easily as merely adding the kindling

> kolinsky (PhD data scientists who created OCEAN personality test): if you knew a person's Facebook likes, you knew they personality. Then you could take that data and tailor messages to them to Reinforce their ideas. - they were one of the had scientists at Cambridge Analytica that targeted trump supporters to encourage their massing to elect trump, claims the author.

> two main "culprits" of danger, Facebook and the smart phone: FB recasts our messy lives around virtual connections and a machine tailored to who it believes we are, and a series of buttons that are increasingly designed to anticipate what we do

> when digital products have increased reach, it means fewer and fewer people are making the decisions

> the less we interact with a product, the more the product uses us.?- airplanes with more automation experience less practice amongst its pilots.

> *** the Automation?Paradox: as machines make things easier for us - as they take more friction away from our daily lives- they leave us less able to do things we once took for granted. (Self-driving cars Make people less prone to watching the road).

The way to combat this is to keep humans in the loop and in control at decisive moments so that their underlying skills stay honed

> user-friendly paradox: 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

> Dreyfuss and his peers didn't believe that convenience itself imbued us with greater meaning. We had to find that meaning on our own. It should not be surprising that the user-friendly world has not provided it for us. (This reinforces Maslows Hierarchy of Needs)

Chapter 10: bus

> after you have designed the Facebook like button, how do you feel with the fact that in a mere ten years a new system of feedback loops rewired how info was spread? If you've designed the iPhone, how do you make peace with marketing, which every year strives to convince the public that last year's phones aren't good enough anymore- thus enshrining planned obsolescence not merely as the cost of doing business, but as the ideal state of tech's progress?

> 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.

Afterward: seeing the world through user friendly eyes

> see the world as a series of experiences ready to be remade

> the best designs dissolve into behavior so that they become invisible rather than stand out for their artistry (fukasawa)

> customer acceptance over implementation

> designer's are not MD or JD's, but they are Prussian tinkerers, with a robust set of prototyping skills that make up for their lack in credentials.?They identify needs, rapidly develop and test solutions, and gather feedback correctly and efficiently

> step by step

1. Start with the customer

A patient would normally sooner ask their hairdresser for "basic" medical advice than their doctor. ... this lead to a medical staff in creating a voucher system to hair dresser for proper usage of their medical system (I think)

2. Walk in the user's shoes

The best work starts with a clear understanding of the user's needs, and not with the desire to produce a "cool product" - Henry Dreyfuss technique.

Designers often have valuable perspectives as a new user, someone who is not already accustomed to the way things are supposed to work

3. Make the invisible visible

Feedback is the universal language of user-friendly design, but the big challenge with designing feedback is figuring out when and where to provide it. Treat your competitors as your first prototypes

4. Build on existing behavior

Observe common situations both at the micro and the macro level. Look at the folds of a napkin in a similar way that a crowd of people flow through a room. Take note of what is surprising and confusing. Patterns of behavior will emerge naturally, and you'll start to notice behaviors that stand out from the norm. Engage those individuals that have experiences outside the norm.?Today's niche markets are tomorrow's mass markets.

5. Climb the ladder of metaphors

Disney magic bands were not designed with the metaphor of jewelry, but as the "keys to the kingdom" from a biblical perspective, this shaped the build of the bracelet

6. Expose the inner logic

Ask the user to sketch the way something works from memory. This will help demonstrate the simple vs the complex components of the product they are referring to.

7. Extend the reach

Consider everything that happens between booking a hotel room and falling asleep the first night at the hotel room. There should be a logical connection between the two events with correct alerts and feedback loops to guide the customer through the experience.

Map out all the different departments a simple customer experiences in a process and find ways to bring the department's to work together to support the customer, rather than as functional silos. The Disney magic band almost did so

8. Form follows emotion

> the job of designers is not just to make things with better so customers can get on with their lives. It's to surprise, delight, and to build a meaningful relationship over time.

Map the steps a customer goes through, and then go through the steps again and put a happy face next to the Good ones and a frown next to the ones that need improvement

Use the power of emotion and story to drive positive user experience

9. The designer's moment of truth

> the moment of truth happens when you put the new product in front of a person and they use it correctly without any training, direction, or explaining. It's also the one that is chosen the most among a group of like products (and can be further organized or differ among demographics)

> the feedback cycle between designer and user is the beating heart of the user friendly world

> the behavior you see is the behavior you designed for Joshua porter, UX teacher)