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 s