User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play

Description

A fascinating look at the secrets of user experience and how brilliant design changes everything, by Robert Fabricant, one of the most influential design minds in the industry AMAZON BEST BOOKS OF 2019 PICK FORTUNE WRITERS AND EDITORS' RECOMMENDED BOOKS OF 2019 PICK 'A tour de force, an engrossing fusion of scholarly research, professional experience and revelations from intrepid firsthand reporting' -- New York Times USER FRIENDLY is a must-read for anyone who loves well-designed products-and for the innovators aspiring to make them. It seems like magic when some new gadget seems to know what we want before we know ourselves. But why does some design feel intrinsically good, and why do some designs last forever, while others disappear? User Friendly guides readers through the hidden rules governing how design shapes our behaviour, told through fascinating stories such as what the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island reveals about the logic of the smartphone; how the pressures of the Great Depression and World War II created our faith in social progress through better product design; and how a failed vision for Disney World yielded a new paradigm for designed experience.

Cliff Kuang (Author) Cliff Kuang is a UX designer and an award-winning journalist. He was previously the design editor at Wired and Fast Company, where he has edited or written over 7,000 articles on design. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The Economist. Robert Fabricant (Author) Robert Fabricant is a co-founder of Dalberg's Design Impact Group and former Vice President of Creative for Frog Design. He has won numerous design awards and has written and spoken widely on design and social impact, for outlets including the Harvard Business Review and SXSW.

A tour de force, an engrossing fusion of scholarly research, professional experience and revelations from intrepid firsthand reporting * New York Times * Engrossing and rich with rarely-told stories and interviews, User Friendly gives critical insights to make us better, smarter consumers of design and user-friendly experiences. A must-read for anyone who cares about design and the challenges it has to meet in the coming decades * Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb * User Friendly starts with the fascinating arc of design in the industrial age, when fortunes could be made by looking more deeply at how we live. But this book brings those insights into the touchscreen age, in which our devices and interfaces sometimes seem to know us better than we know ourselves. Anyone who cares about the fraught but increasingly urgent role that design plays in our lives owes it to themselves to read this hugely compelling book * Scott Dadich, creator of Abstract: The Art of Design and co-founder of Godfrey Dadich Partners * Compulsory reading for the current age, in which business and society have turned to design in pursuit of growth and change. But design means little without empathy, and this book lays out a remarkable tale of how that insight became truth. This essential work shows why design has to be at the center of the human enterprise * Tim Brown, Chair of IDEO and author of CHANGE BY DESIGN * Anyone who cares about the fraught but increasingly urgent role that design plays in our lives owes it to themselves to read this hugely compelling book * Scott Dadich, former Editor-in-Chief, Wired, and creator of ABTRACT: THE ART OF DESIGN *