Next, Technology Journalist and robert recount on the use of designing technology to increase usage in the book user friendly. The hello, friends. You only have to deal with me for about two minutes. I am the cofounder of postflig postflight, the place where you are right now, the company that builds software and all kinds of stuff. Beautiful website at postlight. Com. [inaudible] he asks me why im late on delivering the book and since they are so relevant to what we do here so you are seeing guilt and shame in front of you. [laughter] but with the talk of it about who is here. So, cliff kuang is an awardwinning journalist and designer. This is cliffs right here. He was previously the head of companies as was the defining editor. He worked in the u. S. For a company he is very much a practitioner and leader and writer and communicator speak up [inaudible] one of the leading cofounders so theyve written a book called userfriendly and it talks abo about. Its made people less powerful and so the its a good topic to discuss. Its nice that youre here and enjoying whats been provided for you. You can get them signed a round of introductory applause for the guest. [applause] im out of here. [inaudible] about 15 minutes of an overview of the book i think that this would be a little bit more exciting than the reading. Its what you might expect from reading it is a high will say you already know about me. When robert approached me with a few questions how did we get here and one of the points roberts made his user experien experience. Its around us every minute that we are a week but theres no account of how it came to be. How is it that this discipline that was once obscure came to define so much of our lives. It turns out it that ended up ip taking six years of 200 plus interviews, 40,000 miles flown at this point its actually out and you can see a little bit of review from the new york times. And you can buy it right there. Im going to take you through a couple of different strings of this idea to talk about this opposition of mankind between the people and the machines they use and the second section Product Design of progress and the challenge that we will talk about and then we will answer your question. In the book about technology and how we use technology they are expecting this poster for facebook or apple or someplace like that. Instead im going to invite you to imagine that you are a pilot in world war ii and imagine you are returning home from the mission and suddenly things are going fine and you come in for a nice easy landing after a routine run and suddenly panic. Nothing is working as it should. You find yourself coming in and the plane is shuttering a. Its screeching across the runway and youve realized youve crashed. Your thoughts probably go to the people in the belly of the plane wondering what happened and potentially dead. Im sure they dont know that in its wisdom at the time it is likely to say it is because of the user error. This person wasnt trained enough or should have known better. Because this person shouldnt have been doing what they were doing. This is something you should be able to train with the system into thinking of psychologists at the time believed mankind in some ways was perfectible and you could train them to do anything that you wanted. This is the dominant strain at the time. Imagine what its like to be in that cockpit may be a little nervous, stressed, tired. Its indistinguishable from each other but to do the opposite thing so coming in for a landing you might reach for the landing gear and then not engage and skated right off of the runway. He comes to this ingenious solution for the wings flap control and the landing gear to make them shake differently or not so that just by sitting there closing your eyes without any sort of Reference Point you can feel your way around the cockpit. The solution was on this day. This is why it feels different to the buttons on the arcade controller shaped in different ways. This is why they are all shaped differently with different colors and things like that. You might think that is a nice story this idea was brought to bear and what they were proposing about the airplane costs should work. We cant assume all people at their best at their most rational. They are faced with all these stresses and limitations that make them less than what their best is. It is a little bit paternalistic or little bit odd to say humans are bound to mess things up. This is a beautiful idea that humans are not respectable. This is one of the first prints ss wouldnt it make sense to teach computers about people instead of teaching people about computers so that is an Interesting Data version thats happened right before your eyes they are not going to bend the machines around them. We are going to assume they should abandon themselves to the foibles of the human beings operating them. Second thing, design progress. Im going to invite you again to take a step back. I think that this is a picture of broadway or fifth avenue. Through the medium of print advertising people havent been exposed to just one problem the guy making those ads hate it. They are likely spend so much time putting lipstick on a pig why shouldnt we be the ones actually designing the same since we are th they are the ont know about what consumers are going to react to a he had a funny quark of hating everything in the world around them and namely he thinks theres all of this undifferentiated stuff in the world around us but should be designed. It should be more thoughtful. Hes making an interesting point. The product sets and so as he sets out to codify the philosophy and drawing these pictures of idealized human beings to the picture of the man i showed you before which is what they show you these are nominally drawing the Product Design. With that philosophy yields are some design classics. It is a fascinating handset. Itthe telephone design that iso successful the last handset to be designed because if you look at the icon this is the icon and it hasnt changed and it probably wont change because nobody is buying those phones anymore. Another thing he does is create the idea of experience design cure is a thermometer or thermostat they are meant to change the dial on. In other words he is thinking about how to move through the world and how to manipulate the objects around you and how do i deliver something that is a little bit easier that makes things a little bit more. Saving just a little bit of time is like twiddling with a knob that is seemingly a minor change and its the sense these little tiny moments in time that are given back to people. It somehow adds up to extra time you have in your life to realize the person you want to be to spend time in the moment that they would rather. So it rests on these two ideas the first was we saw in the second is equal progress. These ideas are everywhere. We saw it before with the macintosh computer but i would also say you see is with amazon and this idea to have one click shopping it was compelling enough to define the entire company and its this idea of equal progress and the Facebook Like button that originated incidentally as an experiment in finding the latest wave possible to put positivity into the world. You might find that a little string. The idea that equals progress and that you should differ to the user. So, he says creating this experience isnt an option, there is no choice and heres what its working on today, cruise ships at carnival. One of the things that powers this experience is a sensor that you wear around your wrist and as you move through the ship there are 7,000 sensors that track your progress and that also record things like what youve done, who you are with, they activities they want to do and have done and if they become part of the personal genome so that as they move to the ship and walk past a response to your presence and point you to the next appointment. If you can think about your computer this is basically a rightclick for the real world you have options all around you constantly and everything you have and its everything you see and it is presented to you. Passively. Again, its this idea that if we can provide these things with maximal ease presuming people dont have time it will give them something that is meaningful to them. But if yo what you are asking yf here is what do we lose when everything around you is made easy. So, this of course makes company these days. It makes those companies very quick to scale. It is a rewiring of the infrastructure of delivering products in america to the potential downsides of the conditions for the workers in the warehouse is. It is that interface tha the ins it happened so fast that we cannot reckon with those chang changes. The Facebook Like button this is a picture from the massacre, the ongoing genocide is happening in myanmar and again it started with this idea that we are going to positivity in the world in the latest possible way and by scaling and the ease of the interface didnt allow us to take the time what does this mean for the world to be so connected in a way that they have never been connected before. And of course apple which put the iphone and all of our hands and is now a rewiring the way we interact with each other in space. So here is the coming challenge from this world im trying to paint here is that we have to tackle the contradiction headon. It sounds like a panacea that some of the things i want to point out is every generation deals with conflict and tension that they have to resolve in the new things they make. So, in this case you have to ask the question how do you connect and also stay private and preserved in your sovereignty and connect with people around you. These are tensions that have been created and introduced. We have to ask the question how do we promote both speech and questions of that userfriendly world. How do we make things look easy and this is the hardest thing hell do you make things easy to use but also easy to secondguess. There is a world in which may be the platforms around us become a little bit more open to question and a little bit more amenable to change. The point here is i think the principle of what makes things quote on quote, userfriendly remain important for the world they are trying to make. The feedback between the input and output that changes your behavior is something designers create every day. It comes from high feedback loops wer that were not there be and some of the feedback that turned the knowledge into action for the issue of Climate Change like how do we make people see the stakes in the moment so that they can act on making better decisions. And another point is putting the higher order goal into products, Product Design that is privileged on the idea that you could make a little interaction sitting in front of the user into something thats a little bit easier to manage that sort of misses the idea that this is easy for me in the moment. That isnt good for you in the long term and you know its not, so how do we put those higher order of values in the products that we have and do the products express what we want. How do we square away the difference between what you want and what you actually need, and that is the end of my talk. We will talk a little bit and then open up for questions. Thank you guys. [applause] i want to thank cliff for summarizing a way to not just the sort of conceptualized stuff but actual history in depth presentation and in such a phenomenal way in the book. Can you hear me . I often feel like im operating in a Twilight Zone episode. The book is from a conversation i would like to add that he was fiddling with his phone for the millionth time and he finally put it on the table and said i dont understand how these are so userfriendly. It made a set of ideas are jammed and quite confusing and if you think about the timescale of the last ten years and suddenly it has been a privilege to sort of have a sentiment over a longer period of time and i know there are a couple of people here in the room who kind of remember when thinking about this stuff was pretty small and i remember using this User Experience design from things like this. How many people have a copy of the human interface guidelines i see a few hands going up. I could reach out and almost touch it. He started playing around with multitouch. He loved drumming back in the early 90s. I have my own piece about it and found over time that it was one of the threats they heavily reported on to capture the record and bring it to life. To bring it back up for everybody in the room and everybody that i know because at the end of the day we are left with a set of choices but increasingly how the same systems are going to shape the way we vote and take care of our loved ones all of these same ideas are starting to confuse a broad set of questions and infrastructures that are not the fancy things that are consumer oriented. I think thats part of what im hoping this book teaches people is its made a bunch of decisions and it did at various points of time. You trace it back to the early mechanical designs at the 17th and 18th century. People made choices and there was no great set of expertise. To tell you how to make choices and anticipate these outcomes and what are the right thresholds to go through. Its very much choices individuals are making. The story that is relevant to this audience to the beautiful writing and reporting is meaningful and acceptable but it does create a set of questions and get on. Theyve been asking and our clients havent been able to delve into this. So the questions at the society much more broadly. I recently came back from a trip to india and our team was doing the first deep dive look at the platform and this Digital Identity you cant get a bank account or mobile card in many you cant even take to school if you dont have a Digital Identity. But its also a user centric question in the hands of people what do i do with this identity. How is that going to change the way i live, work, learn or all of those fundamental things so those are the big ideas. It is a bit of a dialogue to question and discuss the tradeoffs that we are all making and understand better kind of why embedding the thinking around the individuals that doesnt result. So that is kind of where we found ourselves and the questions keep coming. I hope that we can use this time to hear from you guys. I think a lot of the questions were designed to on how to make sure this makes sense to speak of a [inaudible] im going to quickly paraphrase on the one hand they are making things a little bit more intuitive and on the other hand you have designers and engineers making decisions based upon the metrics about making money. Heres the thing i think that the ideas that we only make things and the only purpose it can serve as making money. The. A generation that grew up with two working parents coming home to an empty house and working with that connection theyve created social networking which low and behold turned out to be lucrative. There was a societal conversation happening. The new generation that is now growing up in some of the perils of social media now have to bring a different set of assumptions for the coming generations. They are going to optimize for Different Things and trying to resolve the tension ive laid out what it means to be both private and connected to the broad world. Those seem like an impossible demands but these are things the new generation will create if they are cognizant of the tradeoffs that has been made and the shortcomings of the things made for them. But you can also say at the end of the day its only a few people that make those decisio decisions. I work in a Big Tech Company and its actually striking how small some point the positions are and thats something everybody can aspire to. A lot of the work that i do today is about trying to see how to make them more human centered and thats the example i gave working with the government of their. Its of a much deeper value in the way the government or business sees its role in peoples lives and on the one hand theres been a lot of progress in that people are much more aware of the need and opportunity and how that shapes and can shape the choices they make. On the other hand, there are many aspects of the world we operate. You find yourself working on other avenues and that leads to more. Its a whole bunch of areas that seem that philosophy is trying to get. This is where we can sometimes shift those dynamics and its not obvious and on the flipside you see that we are all pretty exasperated by the way in which our information is kind of relative on very specific trails in terms of the connections we hope to be building and replicating all over the world so i dont know that theres been an easy answer for it. For any industry it isnt necessarily that they are running against it are limiting the abilities to drive for the fundamental change. The first step is admitting you have a problem. Any other questions . You kind of alluded to it [inaudible] or the office. To do something that is userfriendly. That is a hard question but one thing i would point out is in the context of the designers being asked to make these broad decisions about to work on the thing they are working on a. The. If im sitting there imagining what its like to be a designer on this system, they would ask the question is the data safe and can it be misused or adapted and then misappropriated in some way in making sure those avenues are being considered so you can be in that position of saying this is a problem for the users and business and raising the consciousness and ultimately if they are not answered in a meaningful way like we are still lucky enough to live in a democracy making public those decisions being made i still think we have a world in which those feedbacks would work partially to amplify the effect. Sometimes we use this analo analogy. It seems like a strange comparison. Design is a collaborative thing that emerges from many decisions. It isnt a single surgical decision we can look at the ethical issues around a system like that but if the individual designers we dont have the authority and thats good because i dont know if we are ready for it. They are pretty interesting as a kind of infrastructure starting to emerge in places you might imagine. We cant judge a system like that but what we were able to do is to show in addition to this and why we created the stories and profiles around how the people were being excluded and the religious minorities it could be detrimental to them or captured and the second is whining the redress of the information. That stuff gets locked in on the bigger numbers so that is the first thing we cannot find the behaviors and the need to find a way to coax a story that otherwise wouldnt be told and that will make you feel a little better about the role you play even if you havent changed in the bigger policies. The second thing, you can make a choice obviously is what you work on and that is something ive done and what works for me, that its hard. Its hard to sort of figure out when i started working i was paid 19,000 a year. It wasnt a good idea to go into this so now we have a whole industry and thats changed a lot how people get their expertise and what expectations they have on what their role is. That isnt a simple answer at the end of the day with the opt in and out of and how can the designers make those choices a little more obvious. Its about the designer ethics more broadly. There are a few cases where you know the consequences are going to be bad or just very few cases that are in that moment. It isnt just the decision not to do something but its that recall and then you are not able to do it. [inaudible] what is the role of the users and people involved in building these creative products. To shift the dynamic in the work that we do i start out with sitting on a tractor learning how to better design that were held to pump gas and now its changed a lot. The goal is to try to figure out how to create a redesign in which you are not just going out trying to learn from somebody that its involved from the beginning and not just the form it takes but the way to change how it works over time and that is very much the philosophy i think that a lot of the bigger ideas around the design. It isnt just going and finding people and learning from them. Theres an entire Cottage Industry how do you bring the user into the dialogue creating something. And in the book, the phrase is industrialized empathy. Like that is one of the major developments in the world of business and technology thats happened in the last 30 years trying to understand people have a meaningful scale. The processes are not perfect and people get them wrong but its remarkable how different the world is now than what it was in recent history, mike to give one example in the book, maybe one of the biggest product failures in the entire history of the car design start is a Market Research but it turns out they were not understanding his can put a bunch of things and people and they will say yes but when you put all of those things together such as a speedometer inside o of the steering well it turns out when you put them together, people dont want it. It is understanding what they would want in the real world and so much of the Way Technology has unfolded in the last 30 years to answer precisely that problem how do i understand the thing people really want that they cannot explicitly say and that is a little bit of what the storthestory and the book is abs how to get to that need that they will tell you about. It was parodied in the census where homer asked for a place that allows him to restrain his kids in the backseat and all these kind of things that nobody wants to buy it because the car is 90,000. This idea that people do one thing they want another thing. That is the idea of what the design is about there are some things people say they cannot. [inaudible] where are the brakes on this design in the networking system . The question just to repeat it we have a process for most products but we dont have a recall process on things such as the white button and in these ways that create such accountability in the process of the design. That is a hard question. For a long time that software is so flexible it is just going to change and i think what we have seen is that actually software encodes so many values in the way that weve organized the world that it becomes much harder. We live in a world in which the physical products that we choose to use in some cases is much, much faster. The icon on my phone had broken record and thats exciting. Its changed a bit but fundamentally we were living with this stuff a lot longer than we needed to and that is a very different mindset then we went into in the world of creating Software Tools and thinking about the User Experience as something we traded and they also knew how to shape them and trade them and it was more about replicating over time than trying i remember back in the days of microsoft studying these environments with the history and culture to them. Its fascinating to see them build up and they were so much more openended. The challenge we have now things dont have that openended nature. They are much more complete experience is and i feel like there is probably a nativism opportunity. I dont know more so than the recall opportunity that i can think of. I would love to think that there is a way at least to sort of go back and create this space for designers to reflect on those consequences because i dont think that dialogue one thing i would point to is the companies that make things and the users have never been closer because of the smartphone that essentially put things like a facebook Insurance Company for example accountable to the app that you make and things like social Media Creative feedback with accountability that never existed before. So a lot of these companies are more accountable than they have ever been before and if you dont know what im talking about its not giving you the flight you want to get out on and they respond. Those things are being listened to by these companies. The numbers on that movement were insane. They netted millions of deletions and i think that there is a world in which that never could have happened but for the same world of creative of these problems and that feedback is something to be highlighted and used. Any other questions . [inaudible] i am terrified sorry. The question is what role do you see the regulations playing of making Better Technology in the world and is that a potential avenue for empowering people to the questions that were asked and the thing i was going to say is im terrified of the current government that we have been able to understand the issues at hand. But what is interesting, i botched the story unfold and its making these International Companies that have to do most constrained markets with the most savvy regulators so i dont think the regulation will come from the United States unfortunately that it is having an effect also i could go down a very wonky rabbit hole sometimes they are missing the mark but at the same time these things are putting values and that were not there before, like the whole idea they could be proposing there are doubts that they can get the nuances right nonetheless, the signal that goes out to every other government they have the potential that ripples across because it is all connected. [inaudible] that is a good example of the limitations. Who remembers browsers before cookies . Business that the government knows what should or shouldnt be collected. Its the fact people have such little recourse to change how their data is being used and captured and the rights for that but theres a huge opportunity on the policy side to policymakers make decisions based on information that is 2yearsold typically because it that is what happened already. And then said to me the opportunities are to make sure the tools for the recourse are easy and flexible and then coming back to india like how do i make sure that those are tested and proven to be effective and the number two, how did you bring the process to the regulatory process so that this can be learned and lived through as opposed to putting the regulators in the position where they are not really qualified to meet the choices they have to. We can do more than mandate the data collection. To change the entire discourse in the way that its happening now i could name two of them off the top of my head. As a user you should be able to own your data and take it with you wherever you go to revoke the privileges to it. That is one potential avenue. I think it doesnt have a snowballs chance of passing in the states. The its also something that would be hard to do here but its possible in other governments to this day. [inaudible] to what extent does the culture of the society have an impact on user friendliness and constructive contributions. How much does the local culture in form the end product of the design and change the assumption that is a hard question i could probably spend an entire book answering again, but it is interesting that if you ask that question asked thl flip it around like why wasnt the product invented in japan or why wasnt any social media invented in europe. The answers are nuanced but they have a lot to do with the culture and the need to be found the most intuitive in the case of japan he happened to have a topdown view of technology and engineering and Product Development that doesnt lend itself to the innovations. In the case of europe, they didnt see the need to share their lives with strangers. This wasnt seen as a valuable outcome. Those communities made Different Things and what is interesting and happening right now as these things are now being made to try to reenact the values of. To keep the trust of the users locally and at the way that the debate is being raised i dont know how it will turn out. I will say there is a cynical reading of the way that the government is regulating the technology which is the only reason they are coming after the United States companies as they want their local companies to be able to compete in these markets and they are trying to make it harder. It is the reason that ive heard so my response to that is let them have it lets see the social Networking Company like this. But word is interesting about the history is the american story of progress and its easy to read a lot of what has happened. That self deterministic idea. And looking for broader cultural examples and to talk to individuals and then at a state level and with those efforts to see the government with this tight one this type of capability and how to interact and share information but it would be easy to look at google or facebook with that mindset and quite skeptical. And it is helpful for me to set out the culture mobile and then to work with families and it is a funny idea they are part of a family and they make decisions collaboratively and it is in and of itself. One more question. Did you ever discover new research. [inaudible] her question is and to craft what they see and to come across any research and in the world that all of these algorithms they never get it right. So they cannot know the fullness of who they are and who you value and who we care about. One of the purposes of writing the book is that in some sense but the algorithms are the black box that they just dont know. And to me that is a major shortcoming. And at some point that the algorithm to take over now. And to see that control in technology that is far too selfaggrandizing. And the positive spin and it is much more conscious and inoculating. And then the social networking on the Mental Wellbeing of adolescents and children. And then to come of age when the iphone was just being introduced with the down side affects of all these things but then what is interesting is the generation after that that grew up with nothing but phones in their lives that goes away. Somehow they are inoculating themselves. They seek out a way to live with the technology that the previous generation just five years removed is not. So all i can say is there is hope we are smarter than we think we are. [laughter] another optimistic note is that no matter what we do the Human Behavior and imagination will always be a few steps ahead. One of the great things and then to get how to figure out and then to interact. And always find things that exist. And that information to a lot of companies and organizations. So that excitement when you find something that opens the door to help people see that we thought were the parameters of what people were doing for their health or for education is always about one of the things about it and something very counterintuitive or how you translate that into an idea and a solution. But will also change what is possible. That is the optimist. Thank you for coming. [applause] thank you everyone. It is such a pleasure to be here and i really enjoy this opportunity to talk about by far the most peculiar book i have ever written in a long shot. I appreciate that and i will share that with you. And this is one how and several competing wise. How do you go about getting the digital equivalent for currency for cash and coining it is a significant technical challenge and you need to create a Digital Object that is dfi