User Friendly – Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant

To achieve any improvement for the American war machine, the machines themselves had to become easier to use for more people, not fewer. Their operations had to be generalized, using some set of principles yet to be articulated. This was the beginning of the discipline called ergonomics and the beginning of an idea we live with still—that machines should be simple to use—so simple even that they’re universal.

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.

What both user-friendliness and behavioral economics shared was an overriding sense that our minds could never be perfected, and that our imperfections made us who we are. This embrace of human limitation was nursemaid to the idea that machines had to be bent around humans.

User-friendliness is simply the fit between the objects around us and the ways we behave. So while we might think that the user-friendly world is one of making user-friendly things, the bigger truth is that design doesn’t rely on artifacts.

Whether it’s the rules of conversation or the rules of interface design, the goal is to communicate in a way that’s easy to follow. The interactions are all structured around feedback, so that both partners know that they’re aligned. Sometimes, in the case of a nuclear reactor panel, that feedback is a set of lights telling us that what we’ve just done was indeed what we wanted to do. In our social lives, feedback comes in the form of a conversational partner unconsciously nudging us with their body language about whether the conversation is going well. Whether we’re communicating with a human or a machine, the goal is to create a shared understanding of the world. That’s the point behind both the rules governing polite conversation and how a user-friendly machine should work.

“What if you have a machine that can do a better job than you can, but that doesn’t act anything like you?” he asked. “You’re creating a new class of being. So what is your relationship like?”

Would we really want to live in a world that was truly friction-free, where the room temperature adjusted before we ever had a chance to feel any kind of discomfort? Wouldn’t that make us more and more like floating brains in a vat stuck in The Matrix, unaware of what’s real? Wouldn’t the machines then be dictating our desires, rather than merely anticipating them?

That power is what allows metaphors to transfer ideas from a specialized domain—say, the inner workings of a bunch of networked computers, known only to their engineers—to a new cohort. Metaphors strip away what’s specialized and complex, focusing our attention on just the few things we need to make sense of something, the ideas we share. Saying the internet is like a web of information, connected by links, tells you what the web is for: joining up spheres of knowledge. It implies what you might do, even what you might invent. Metaphors become so embedded in our experience that they seem second nature: time is money; life is a journey; the body is a machine. But often, the metaphors we live with have been designed.

A good coach wasn’t a scold, because the work of being better still fell to the athlete herself. A good coach would also always know what you needed to do—and tell you just enough information to do it, but no more. That metaphor drove new design principles, which in turn fostered dozens of designs: Support but don’t shout. Give enough information to act, and no more.

Metaphors accomplish something essential to human progress: They don’t just spur us to make new things; they inspire the ways in which those things will behave once they’re in our hands.

That’s how metaphors work: Once their underlying logic becomes manifest, we forget that they were ever there. No one remembers that before the steering wheel in a car, there were tillers, and that tillers made for a natural comparison when no one drove cars and far more people had piloted a boat. The metaphor disappeared once driving cars became common. In digesting new technologies, we climb a ladder of metaphors, and each rung helps us step up to the next.

The rule for metaphor in design is fake it till you make it. Apple had made it, after faking it for so many years.

But the only way to teach people to predict what the world might need was to explode their assumptions. As William Clancey sums up in his recently published introduction to John Arnold’s Creative Engineering, “Our cultural milieu, our peers, and norms instilled in how we act, look, talk, and relate to our environment contribute to our blindness and limit how we generate new ideas.”

That finding an interesting problem is even more important than finding an interesting solution.

The best students didn’t demonstrate creativity in solving a problem so much as in finding the problem.

Even if the design industry changes, what problems will it look to solve? Today, we are drowning in interactions with smartphones and smart devices, such as our cars and homes—all of which suddenly want to talk to our phones as well. We live in a world of countless transitions. Instead of there being one device, there is actually an infinite number of handoffs between devices.

“There is no such thing as a normal human,” Holmes said. “Our capabilities are always changing.”

But we are already dealing with a world in which computers are becoming a finer and finer reaction of how we’re made. They’re luring us in not just with clean and orderly buttons, but with predictions about how we feel, based on knowledge about who we are.

Today, we are surrounded more and more by technology like this, meant to serve us without our ever having to ask or even to push a button. No matter how often we say we’re creeped out by technology, we acclimate surprisingly quickly if it anticipates what we want.

Rather, it was experiencing something that has become common in this user-friendly era, when entire organizations have to work together to create one simple thing that every one of their customers will touch. How do you get one thousand people to agree on a single detail in an app, or one tiny piece of the MagicBand system, if they don’t share a vision? The modern corporation wasn’t designed to serve up a coherent experience. It was designed for the division of labor, to expend its energies on the efficiency of the parts rather than the shape of the whole. Those seams are obvious once you start to look at them.

Perhaps there is a natural limit to how much people can collaborate on a shared vision. Or perhaps one of those companies will invent new tools and a new way of working. Or perhaps a newer company will come along and sweep them all away by better assembling the pieces they’ve already laid.

“It’s been fascinating to see the Like button succeed beyond our wildest imagination.”

“Once you know how to push people’s buttons, you can play them like a piano,” wrote the designer Tristan Harris. “Tech companies often claim that we’re just making it easier for users to see the video they want to watch” when they are actually serving their business interests. And you can’t blame them, because increasing ‘time spent’ is the currency they compete for.”

And so, without ever realizing what you’re doing, you’re checking them all again in a couple of minutes: Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. Each of them has some kind of variation on the ubiquitous pull-to-refresh gesture—pull the screen down, or tap a button, and a new batch of updates loads, ready for your consumption. That gesture is nothing if not a modified lever at a slot machine. Sometimes you get nothing for your efforts. It’s the variability that hooks you, day after day. By some estimates, we check our phones about eighty-five times a day.

User-friendliness wrought a world in which making things easier to use morphed into making them usable without a second thought. That ease eventually morphed into making products more irresistible, even outright addicting.

For the first time in the history of user-friendly design, you could change a person’s experience based on not just assumptions about an individual, but actual knowledge.

While it may become easier and easier to consume things, it will become harder and harder to express what we truly need.

To be clear, I’ve focused on Facebook because it has had the most obvious and far-reaching influence on society. But none of the other tech giants whose influence springs from creating user-friendly products is immune to criticism. The surface of their products hides outcomes, costs, and audiences we cannot see. You cannot see the workers in an Amazon warehouse, struggling to make ends meet, sometimes not working at all for days at a time, then clocking in for backbreaking twelve-hour shifts. Apple, for its part, helped make Facebook possible, by creating the very imperative that our entire lives fit onto a tiny screen.

Of course, there is always a gap between the things we use and the expertise required to make them work. That’s what it means for something—anything—to be user-friendly. You don’t need to know how Facebook works to enjoy it. You don’t need to know why the smartphone looks the way it does in order to get value out of it. This is progress. One reason our society works is that we leave complex details for specialists to work out; what those specialists know is often provided to everyone else in the form of neatly designed products that are easy to use.

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 worth wanting. They only feel inevitable because someone designed them, and in doing so buffed away the clues of what might have been otherwise. That doesn’t mean those clues don’t exist, or that the gadgets themselves can’t be undone.

The things we make reflect the things we value. Those values can change. Even if the user-friendly world is straining to understand us better, that doesn’t mean it cannot change with us.