User Friendly

The first book to tell the story of the ways in which design is reshaping life in the twenty-first century

User Friendly opens with two very different stories. In 1979, a series of failures leads to the catastrophic accident at Three Mile Island; one of the most critical of these failures is a design flawa key indicator in the plants control room is hidden from the operators sight line. In 2018, a giant, futuristic Apple campus is built on the back of sales of the iPhone, the most user-friendly device ever made. The two stories are part of one larger narrativethe story of the surprisingly recent innovation of putting users at the center of design.

In User Friendly, Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant unpack the ways in which the world has beenand continues to beremade according to the principles of a relatively obscure discipline: user experience design. Its spread is intertwined with the sweeping changes of the last century, from womens rights to the Great Depression and World War II and the rise of the digital era. Its ideals have shaped the world around us, from washing machines to self-driving cars to social media.

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 timeand youll never interact with technology the same way again.

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