User Friendly #1: A Very Brief History

Cliff Kuang’s book, User Friendly, is an interesting romp of how much the design of products has evolved to make them easy to understand and use. It wasn’t always that way. Once upon a time:

“(The view was) that correctly operating a machine was about finding the right person to operate it.”

‘Pilot error’ is the term that sums up that attitude – if something went wrong, it was the user’s fault.

 

The World Wars began to change that. Why?

“The performance of men under stress bore no resemblance to that of those operating a demonstration model.”

And from that emerged the idea that machines could/should be designed to “better conform to the limits of (humans’) senses and minds”.

 

That mindset eventually spilled over into consumer products. The driver was consumerism – businesses could see that user friendliness could be the “elixir of sales growth”.

 

But it needed the “profusion of computers and electrical gadgets” for the trend of designing for the user to really take off. And now, the smartphone and apps have taken it a whole new level.

 

The term ‘pilot error’ has been replaced by ‘designer error’.

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