In User Friendly, Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant reveal the untold story of a paradigm that quietly rules our modern lives: the assumption that machines should anticipate what we need. Spanning over a century of sweeping changes, from women's rights to the Great Depression to World War II to the rise of the digital era, this book unpacks the ways in which the world has been-and continues to be-remade according to the principles of the once-obscure discipline of user-experience design.
In this essential text, Kuang and Fabricant map the hidden rules of the designed world and shed light on how those rules have caused our world to change-an underappreciated but essential history that's pieced together for the first time. Combining the expertise and insight of a leading journalist and a pioneering designer, User Friendly provides a definitive, thoughtful, and practical perspective on a topic that has rapidly gone from arcane to urgent to inescapable. In User Friendly, Kuang and Fabricant tell the whole story for the first time-and you'll never interact with technology the same way again.
"A readable, instructive study of the role of design in making our lives easier to live . . . Of a piece with the work of Henry Petroski or Donald Norman, Kuang and Fabricant's book serves up plenty of useful examples and offers a few rules for would-be designers, the very first of which is 'start with the user.' A book that belongs on every designer's shelf"
