User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play
Picked by both Amazon and Fortune as one of the standout books of 2019, this co-authored work by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant earned a glowing nod from the New York Times, which called it 'an engrossing fusion of scholarly research, professional experience and revelations from intrepid firsthand reporting.' High praise, and it's largely warranted. At its heart, the book asks a quietly fascinating question: why do certain objects feel almost instinctively right to use, while others frustrate us within minutes? That sensation of a product just 'getting' you isn't luck or magic. It's the result of principles, some well understood and some surprisingly obscure, that have been quietly shaping human behaviour for decades. What makes the book genuinely absorbing is its storytelling. The authors trace these ideas through a set of richly unexpected case studies. The nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, for instance, turns out to reveal a great deal about the logic buried inside your smartphone. The anxieties of the Great Depression and the upheaval of the Second World War, it turns out, planted the seeds of our collective belief that better-designed products can mean a better society. A scrapped vision for Disney World led, indirectly, to a whole new way of thinking about designed experiences. It's a book for curious readers who appreciate well-made things, and for those who want to understand, or perhaps create, the next generation of them.
- Author: Robert Kuang, Cliff, Fabricant
- Publisher: WH Allen
- Genre: Design & Fashion
- ISBN: 978-0753556658
- Pages: 416 pages