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 user interaction design? What is the importance of feedback on products?
One of the most important components of product design is that it interacts with the user. The user should be able to receive feedback such as a beeping sound or flashing light when there’s a problem that needs to be attended to.
Let’s look at how user interaction design helps consumers, according to User Friendly by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant.
Provide Useful Feedback
A key component of user-friendly design that Kuang and Fabricant describe is user interaction design: a way of confirming with the user that an action was performed or that a product is doing what they want it to. Interaction and 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.
(Shortform note: One reason good feedback is important is that it reinforces the relationship between cause and effect when someone is learning how to use a new device or navigate a new interface. So when someone hovers their mouse over a box on a computer screen, an immediate change in color indicates that there’s a clickable button. After clicking, if the screen changes quickly, the user then understands what the button accomplishes. Because users rely on instantaneous feedback, the recommended guideline for feedback responses in a user interface is one-tenth of a second.)
Three Mile Island Case Study
Kuang and Fabricant use the example of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident in 1979 to illustrate the potentially catastrophic impact of poor feedback design. In this case, when a nuclear reactor malfunctioned and began overheating and leaking radiation, the employees were unable to identify the problem due to a couple of key design flaws. First, there was a light indicator that was designed to turn off when a switch was flipped to close a valve rather than turn off when the valve was physically closed.
Thus, when the button gave false feedback about the system—saying a valve was closed when it wasn’t—it took hours for employees to realize that the valve was stuck open. In addition, the reactor had entire walls of lights and controls with ambiguous meanings and with no logical groupings or spatial arrangements to help the employees create a good mental model of the reactor. For example, a turned-on light might indicate that a valve was open, but it might not be the case that the valve was supposed to be open. A user-friendly feedback system would consistently use green lights to indicate that things are as they should be so that people could quickly troubleshoot problems.
Impact of the Three Mile Island Accident on Nuclear Energy
The radiation released during the accident was determined to be negligible for the residents and environment surrounding the nuclear power plant, and there were no deaths or injuries attributed to the accident. However, the accident sparked public protests and distrust over the safety of nuclear energy due to the extreme health risks of radiation exposure. This shift in popular opinion made it difficult for politicians and governments to continue expanding nuclear energy production.
Analysis of the events and public opinion also led to sweeping reforms in safety regulations, design strategies, and employee training. In the years that followed, dozens of nuclear power plants that were scheduled to be built were canceled, and the construction of nuclear power plants declined drastically from the 1980s up to now. Only one new nuclear power plant has come into production in the US since 2010.
In Numbers Don’t Lie, Vaclav Smil writes that while some people point to nuclear energy as the best alternative to fossil fuel energy, it has failed to replace fossil fuel partly because of catastrophic accidents such as the Three Mile Island incident as well as others in Chernobyl, Ukraine and Fukushima, Japan. Smil writes that another barrier to using nuclear energy is the high cost of designing and building safe nuclear power plants.
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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
