Design Thats Got Users in Mind – The New York Times

For user-centered design, metaphors are not enough. Successful products often give people what theyve wanted all along without realizing it, rather than what they say they want. The authors invoke the phrase industrialized empathy to describe the patient fieldwork required to understand how people use objects and software, and the rounds of prototype testing frequently needed for successful product development. Such industrialized empathy led to the discovery that DVR viewers often wanted dialogue clarified and thus the two-second rewind was born.

Empathy creates social dividends. Subway station elevators and cuts in sidewalk curbs benefit not only people with special needs but almost everybody examples of whats called universal design. Kuang and Fabricant cite the thick-handled OXO peeler, designed to ease the pain of arthritis, which became a best seller among unaffected people. They also observe a Microsoft researcher as he discusses the limitations of the companys Xbox console with a deaf gamer and concludes that the design could be tweaked in a way that would benefit hearing players as well.

User-experience designers have explored other social dimensions of technology: how electronic assistants should interact with owners, for instance, and how hybrid and electric automobiles can encourage energy-efficient driving through gentle feedback. A display in the Ford Fusion depicted multiplying leaves on a vine when drivers optimized behavior, turning energy conservation into a game of greening the dashboard.

Kuang and Fabricant also consider design in the context of the now-familiar debates over screen addiction and social medias effect on politics, but another topic they address may be even more important. The better technology is at automating tasks and anticipating our behavior, they argue, the greater the threat to our own skills, and to the serendipity that can result from delay and deliberation. One of their most intriguing observations involves the contrast they draw from an argument between Douglas Engelbart and Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in artificial intelligence. The former regarded information technology as a tool for extending and augmenting our intelligence, the latter as a system for replacing and improving on human beings. The authors favor Engelbart, but the Minskians, they point out, are still with us, in the form of self-driving car manufacturers, for example, who have recently begun lobbying for the abolition of steering wheels and pedals.

On balance, User Friendly is a tour de force, an engrossing fusion of scholarly research, professional experience and revelations from intrepid firsthand reporting.

The books single weakness may be that it shortchanges the history of user-friendly design in this country. Already in the late 18th century, members of the Shaker religious sect used special vises to craft the forerunners of our current flat straight-edged brooms in the interest of godly cleanliness. Shakers also helped spread another early American folk favorite, the rocking chair, a masterpiece of empathetic design. The superbly balanced American felling ax, celebrated in Walt Whitmans immortal Song of the Broad-Axe, was a favorite of the British prime minister and gentleman woodcutter William Ewart Gladstone. User friendliness is as American as five-minute microwaved apple pie.

The greatest challenge for designers may be the unintended consequences of promising ideas. The founders of the e-cigarette company JUUL graduates of Stanfords celebrated graduate program in product design originally aimed to make a safer nicotine alternative for adult smokers. Now theyre confronting a firestorm over the health risks of their product. JUULs ease of use, proclaimed in a winning entry to an international design award, paradoxically has become part of the case against it.

Finally, new research suggests that user-friendly design can sometimes be too convenient. Harder-to-read fonts promote better learning, according to psychologists who call this paradox disfluency. Other studies have shown that the difficult work of taking lecture notes in longhand instead of with laptops forces paraphrase, leading to deeper understanding. Will user tough love become the new user friendliness?

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Design Thats Got Users in Mind - The New York Times