This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "User Friendly" by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What is a user-friendly design? What are the components of a human-centered design menu?
User-friendly design is exactly what the name implies: it puts the user first. In Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant’s book User Friendly, they dive into the different requirements to make technology accessible and satisfying for consumers.
Keep reading to learn more about the three components of user-friendly design.
Components of User-Friendly Design
What exactly does human-centered and user-friendly design mean? What criteria are user experience designers thinking about when they invent a new gadget, and what makes products appealing and intuitive to consumers?
Cliff and Fabricant explain that user-friendly products must prioritize the needs of the user, have a mental model or underlying metaphor that makes them easily navigable, and for more advanced technologies like computers—they should mirror human values in the way they interact with us. In the rest of this section, we’ll dive deeper into each of these components and how they show up in everyday products.
1. Addresses User Needs
The first key quality of a user-friendly device is something that fundamentally makes the user’s life easier. Kuang and Fabricant contend that it’s not enough for a product to simply look nice—it must also be something that people are motivated to use.
Kuang and Fabricant write that product designers have to be tuned into the needs and desires of others without being limited by their own experience of the world. Therefore, it’s important that good user experience designers observe behavioral patterns and empathize with users’ experience to come up with ideas. For example, if you were trying to come up with a new idea for a kitchen gadget, you might observe many different kinds of people cooking and notice at what points people tend to get frustrated or what tasks are particularly tedious. Then, by empathizing with users, you can gain insight into how to make the user experience better.
Kuang and Fabricant claim that inconveniences that users experience—what the authors call “frictions”—are opportunities to make tangible improvements in people’s lives. For instance, the immersion blender (a handheld device that purées food in a pot or bowl) is appealing to consumers because it eliminates the need to wait for a hot soup to cool down, transfer it to a blender, blend it, then transfer it to another container again. It reduces the number of steps to complete a task, and it’s also easier to clean than a traditional blender.
Kuang and Fabricant write that focusing on physical or cognitive disabilities can also be a good source of inspiration for user-friendly innovations that will be widely appreciated.
An example of this is the origin story for the thick, rubbery handles on vegetable peelers designed by the company OXO. The company’s founder, Sam Farber, claims that the design was inspired by his wife, whose arthritis prevented her from using traditional, narrow, metal-handled peelers. By designing a peeler that was more user-friendly for people with arthritis (because it’s broader and made of a material that’s easier to grip), the company created a product that was more comfortable for everyone to use.
2. Has a Good Mental Model
According to Kuang and Fabricant, another quality that is central to human-centered design is a good mental model—a metaphor or framework that helps people conceptualize how a product should work. An effective mental model makes a product easily navigable so that the user intuitively understands how to use it without much training or instruction.
For example, on many websites with user profiles, like a bank website or an online application platform, there’s a “dashboard” page. The term dashboard automatically brings to mind the commonly understood concept of a car dashboard: the place you check to find information about the status of the car, trip mileage, and notifications of anything going wrong. By using the car dashboard as a mental model, website designers signal to users that they should use the online dashboard as a primary point of reference.
3. Provides Useful Feedback
The next key component of user-friendly design that Kuang and Fabricant describe is feedback: a way of confirming with the user that an action was performed or that a product is doing what they want it to. Feedback might include things like a light that indicates when something’s been turned on or a beeping sound that accompanies the press of a button. Although these design components might seem like minor details, the authors assert that a lack of timely and specific feedback in a technology can have serious consequences.
For example, if a car only had one alarm sound that indicates that something’s malfunctioning, people would have no idea how to begin troubleshooting the problem or how urgent or dangerous the problem is. It would take a long time to figure out whether the alarm was referring to low windshield wiper fluid or an impending breakdown. Instead, modern cars give us more targeted feedback about what’s going on—like a specific alarm and symbol indicating that someone doesn’t have their seatbelt on, lights that indicate what gear the car is in, and a flashing “check engine” light that indicates a serious mechanical problem.
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant's "User Friendly" at Shortform.
Here's what you'll find in our full User Friendly summary:
- A look at the evolution of user-friendly design, from the 1920s to today
- How excessive user-friendliness is causing a technology addiction
- How user-friendliness can be used to reflect the values of customers instead
