#Book: «User Friendly: how the hidden rules of design are changing the way we live»
«User friendly» for me always meant «something mysteriously unexplainable». A bunch of characteristics, that makes me feel more or less comfortable while using something. So when I would use an app, a program, a service, and feel good after that, I would call an app, a program, a service «user friendly». Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant, authors of this book, helped me to see a much bigger picture.
They tell stories and illustrate them with very illustrative examples. Things around me started to look a bit different to me after I read how they were created, with what ideas in mind, and how their creators came to those ideas.
Dreyfuss described design as an act of translation between the companies that made things and the consumers who used them.
The bigger picture for me here is:
1) the comfort feeling, the positive experience as a whole, can be decomposed to the quality of feedback, simplicity of use, answering the needs
2) As a UX writer, I create text for the interfaces. For some time I had doubts when I wanted to read a book that was not about writing. Now all my doubts are gone. It is absolutely not enough to be good at writing, to do my job well. I need to know more about design, the human brain, perception. At first, I need to understand the interface, users, and their needs, only just after that, I can decide if the text is even needed.
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. <...> it relies on our patterns of behavior.
The history of design mirrors the history of humanity. At some point, we needed things that did their job so we could do ours. At another point, we needed things to be beautiful according to how we understood the beauty at that time. For a long time, things (physical objects, just as programs) were designed as main figures, people learned how to work with them and take care of them. That time has gone and now we create things that are intuitively understandable.
I took this picture of a military ship`s equipment in Germany, in Peenemünde. On the site of the Historical Technical Museum in a small harbor, military ships serve their educational service. I decided, it would be interesting to see texts as a part of interfaces, created to be used in situations of danger, under attack, out at sea, when one wrong decision may cost a life.
For a reasonable price of 5 euros, I bought an excursion ticket and took a look at the inner world of the military ship. Captain`s bridge, small dining room with a hatch in the floor that read «Fuel Tank», narrow corridors and low ceilings, and wherever I went, I saw control panels with abbreviations, restrictions, instructions that were hard to follow. Hundreds of devices are on that ship, and all of them look like they were created last-minute without thinking who will be handle them and in what conditions.
<...> it seemed obvious, that people weren`t to blame for the errors they made.
In the book, there are more examples like that. From multiple illustrations of user-hostile interfaces, it leads us up to the origin of the definition «user friendly» and its development to our days.
The next generation of design will become less about screens and things, and more about scripts and cues.
Special «thank you» to authors
Consider a mathematician: On her own, she can make logical leaps and connections, yet she could not imagine her way to every nuance and callback required to prove Fermat`s last theorem.
In every single book, that I`ve read till this one, random specialists were described as men by default. A surgeon, a scientist, a mathematician was a «he» doing important job to give a reader an example. And it was always a perfect explanation for that — «when we say «man», we know that can be man or a woman». I advocate for feminitives, the subject isn`t new to me, but it struck me, really struck, how different this «she» looked like in the string of text. How it changed immediately my view of what was going on. How simple yet absolutely unusual it was. In this piece of text, where «mathematician, a she» suddenly became clearly visible, I saw how truly invisible she was in books that I read before.
I recommend reading this book to all who create interfaces. Especially to my collegues UX writers, we all need to see a bigger picture behind the string of text.
Berlin-based UX writer, editor.
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