A leading journalist and a pioneering designer describe how design is changing the shape of modern life and remaking it according to the principles of user experience design, from washing machines to self-driving cars and social media. Illustrations.
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"User Friendly is a tour de force, an engrossing fusion of scholarly research, professional experience and revelations from intrepid firsthand reporting."
EDWARD TENNER, The New York Times Book Review
In User Friendly, Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant reveal the untold story of a paradigm that quietly rules our modern lives: the assumption that machines should anticipate what we need. Spanning over a century of sweeping changes, from womens rights to the Great Depression to World War II to the rise of the digital era, this book unpacks the ways in which the world has beenand continues to beremade according to the principles of the once-obscure discipline of user-experience design.
In this essential text, Kuang and Fabricant map the hidden rules of the designed world and shed light on how those rules have caused our world to changean underappreciated but essential history thats pieced together for the first time. 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.
