User Friendly #4: Present Day

For most millennials, the smartphone has made everything hassle-free. No queues, no waiting, no commuting, no cooking. So much so, writes Cliff Kuang in User Friendly.

“The real world was getting to be disappointing when compared with the frictionless ease of the virtual world.”

 

Apps are individualized, not shoehorned for everyone:

“We all use the same containers – whether it’s apps or smartphones – but everything inside is different for each of us.”

Digital ads are highly individualized too. Carpet bombing everyone with the same ads is history, thanks to how much Google and Facebook know about us. It can even feel creepy, how much your phone seems to know about you.

 

Which is why Kuang says:

“User-friendliness wrought a world in which making things easier has morphed into making them usable without a second thought. That ease eventually morphed into making products more irresistible, even outright addictive.”

 

From a ‘pilot error’ mindset to ‘designer error’ mindset to a ‘make it so easy that it is addictive’ mindset, usability design has come a long way.

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