Transcripts For CSPAN2 Cliff Kuang Robert Fabricant User Fr

CSPAN2 Cliff Kuang Robert Fabricant User Friendly July 13, 2024

All right. Hello, friends. You have to be with me for about two minutes. I am a cofounder of postlight, the place whereou are, and if the company that builds software. We have a website. We have a podcast i do w with my cofound all kinds of things. The arbitrary that brings you all here is he continual asked me while im late on delivering my book to ht thihis event and the space was very glad to do. Since theyre so conceptually relevant to what we do here. So just know youre seeing guilt life in front of you and shame. But from that pointet me stop talking about myself. Talk little bit about the book here. Cliff kuangng is an awardwinnig journalist and an experienced designer. This is cliff right here. Whoo was previously ahead of a company as well as a design editor. In the role founded one of the worlds leading design publications. He works for a company that isnt all related related to this but hes a very much a practitioner and a leader and a writer and a communicator and is been working hard at it for very long time. Another person working at it for very long time is robert fabricant. Robert fabricant, the former vi president for frog design which is if you dont know its shameful, you should know, and one of the leading industrial the last 50 years, and an awardwinning cofounder. Theyve written the book that is a very good book, its called user friendly and it talks about just the way we t try to make everything easy with the software and devices and t they may be as a side effect we made everything friction free and make people less powerful. Its a very good topic to discuss and something we deal with everyday. So before i will remark there are booksks for sale and its ne you are here and im gladd you are enjoying the fear that is provided for you and you might want to consider how capitalism works and what your role is in it because those books dont its a books, so they are right there. You can credit cards accepted . All right, credit card spirit what about ch . This is shameful. You can get them sign and theyre really nice books. You should buy them. Thank you. With that note i think a nice introductory a round of applause for our cherished guests. [applause] so i will say you guys already know about me. Thank you, paul. Thisis book started six years ao and it started when robert approached me with a few questions, you know, one of which is like we design but why, and how did we cater. One of the points rubbermaid is user experience, walkie word, has become this thing that confuses our daily life and is around us every minute that we are awake. Butt theres been no account of how this came to be or why that should matter to the person on the street. How is it this discipline that was once obscure came to define so much of our lives . It turns out it ended up taking six years about 200 plus interviews, 40,000 miles flown and at this point its actually out. You can see a little bit of a review from the New York Times and you can buy it right there. Overview. Im going to take you guys through a couple different strains of what produced the city of userfriendly. So first in that first section im going to talk about this opposition between mankind and machine, between the people and the machines they use and the second section im going to talk with the second Product Design as progress and then well talk about the world to come, and the sort of the will arise and we will talk about that and then will answer your questions. Lets talk about man versus machine. In the book about technology and how we use technology and how it fits and allies youre probably expecting this will start with facebook or apple or some pla like that. Instead what is going to is invite you to imagine youre a b17 pil in world war ii. Imagine your returning home from a mission and then suddenly things are going fine, youre coming in for a nice easy landing after like like a a roe bombing run or Something Like that. Sudden panic. Nothing is working as a should. You find yourself coming in, the plane is shattering, its screeching acrs the runway. You realize your crashed. Your thoughts probably go to the people in the belly of the plane who were sitting down to wondering whatt happened and potentially dead. Youre playing skids off the runway a you dont know why. So the question is what happened to that pilot in the moment im sure theyont know. But the airport in its infinite wisdom at the time is likely to say its because of user error. Its because this person wasnt trained enough. Its because this person should have known better. Its because this person shouldnt have been doing what they were doing. That, in fact, is the progress of the time, this idea that some people are user prone and this is something you should be able to train out of the system. This is m much in keeping with e psychologist at the time who believed that mankind is some wayy was perfectible, you can train it to do anything you wanted. This is what psychchology, thiss the domant strain at that time. So into this guy, he returns to this cockpits and imagines what its like to be in that cockpit, maybe it will nervous threaten, tired, eager to get home, eager for the Plaintiff Mission to be over. He realizes something thats really interesting, which is the landing gear and the wing flaps inin the plane are interesting chewable from each other but to do the opposite thing. So coming in from landing you might reach for the landing gear instead pull the wing flap and not engage and just skimmed right off the runway. He comes up wh this ingenious solution which is the shape code, the wing flap control and the landing gear to make them shave carefully, to make the knobs shaped particularly such as by sitting there closing her eyes without any Reference Point roger you can feel your way around the cockpit, you can feel what going on and you know how to use the thing you are using. That solution lives on to this day. You can find it in airplane cockpits b but its also all the knobs in the car are shaped differently. Itshy they feel differently. Its why the buttons on our archaic control are all shaped in different ways. This is the reason why the buttons in an app are all shaped differently, different colors and things like that. To tell you this is how use this and this is how use of that. He may be thinking thats nice, a nice story a about the bombers but the pointer theres a bigger ea brought to bear in what chapanis is proposing pathway airplane cockpits should work. Like the thing he was trying to get at is this idea you cant listen people are at the best and the most ratiol. You have to instead assume they are limited, theyre stressed, tired, faith with all the stresses and limitations that make them less thann what theire best is. This isnt a bad thing. This is whatt means instead to be human, right . You may be thinking like thats a look at paternalistic or odd to say oh, humans are just what it want to say is this is a beautiful idea. This design idea that humans are not perfectible. They are just humumans, right . You can see 30 years later with the idea goes in the following. This is like one of the first print apps for the macintosh and things want to draw your attention to is a little text that says we do make sense to teach computers about people instead teaching people about computers . Thats an interesting inversion thats happening right before your eyes thanks to these crashes that were happening in world war ii which is like when i presuming that men are going to bend themselves around the machines around them. We are going to presume the machines should bend themselves to the foibles of the human beings operating them. And that will see in the second changes the dialogue that we have with the world around us. So second thing, design as progress. Im going to invite you again to take a step back. Imagine yourself in the 1920s. This is a picture of broadway or fifth avenue. I cant member whi. Massproduce goes into the home. Advertisingg is still nation. Its still extremely wildly effective this idea you can communicate with people through the medium of print advertising or radio advertising. Still a new thing people have been exposed to. Just one problem is the guy making those ads hates it. They are like we spend so much time like putting lipstick on a pig, like should we be the ones designing these things since were the ones who know about what consumers are going to react to ask so this guy comes along, Henry Dreyfuss, suave, elegant man who is this like funny quirk of hating everything the world around him. Mainly, he thinks l like theres all this crap, and differing cod crap in the world around us that should be designed, should be more thoughtful. He was making interesting point basically saying just like chapanis before them, start with the human first and the thing is, in thinkining about the hum, think now to live their lives first, he starts thinking about this ideahat its not the product itself that is important thing, its thehe context that a prproduct fits. As he sets out to codify this philosophy, start drawing these pictures of like idealized human beings, average human beings, that bear a striking resemblance to the picture of the true view man that i should be for which a liquid that shows like a human being of the center of the universe. These are nominally trunks about product size but what you dont see at all in these drawings were actual products. You just see people. What the philosophy yields are some design classics for example, the fell 500 telephone which has a handset which is basically meant to be cradled s you can be doing other things, indigent people around you and moving around your house when using a telephone, at the telephone design so successful is probably the last headset ht will be designed because he can look a the icon on your smartphone this is the icon and it hasnt changed. A popular change because. And the thing he does is create this idea of expense design which is like heres a thermometer or thermostat you are meant to change the dial on and the reason its rent on the outside with the reader in december because you dont obscure that out with your hand. In other words, hes thinking about how do you move to the world and how t to manipulate te objects around you and how do ii dever something thats a little bit easier that makes things a little bit more easy, right . The thing thats revolutionary inhis area is about its not thats like nice to have, like saving just a bit of time like twiddling with a knob which is seemingly minor change, its the sense that all these little tiny changes all t these little tiny moments in time that a a given back to people because things are easier or easier to use on more intuitive, somehow at up to progress, right . Somehow add up to extra time you ve in your life to realize the person you want to be to spend time in the moment you would rather spend them. So they userfriendly world rests on these ideas. The first being deferred to the user that we saw with chapanis and the second, equal progress. These ideas are everywhere we saw before with the macintosh computer but i would also say you see with amazon in this idea you could have one click shopping. Why was that an idea that thousands or millions of people decicided to inves in . Why was it an idea that w was compelling enough to define an entire company . If this idea that easy equals progress. And the Facebook Like button which originated incidentally as an experiment in finding the lightest way possible, the lightest weight possible to put positivity into the world. You might find that a a little strange, but nonetheless thats how it started. Lets talk about the coming world that that world has produced come this idea that easy equals progress and we should defer to the user. This guy, he s says creating ths kind of frictionless experience isnt an optioion. Theres no choice. Heres what hes working on today, who ships, carnival. One of the things that powers this expense is a ocean mcgahn which is essential to wear around your wrist. As you move through the ship there are 7000 sensors threat that ship the track your progress that also record things like what you have done, who you are with, the activityou want to do, the activities you have done and they become part of personal genome, its wreak havoc chelated recalculated 700 times per second. Those screens respond to your present. Anticipate what you want and make recmendations about what you might see. What you can think about this, you can think about your computer, this is basically a rightclick, this idea of options already constantly and everything you and everything you see and his options are esented to you frictionless, i can this idea if we can provide these things with maximum ease and presuming people are hurried that the one of time that will give them something that is meaningful to them. But the question youre probably asking yourself is like what do we lose with every singlgle choe around you is made easy . Of course makes companies these days. Making something easier makes companies able to be successful. It makes those companies very quic to scale. That amazon one click button was created within ten ten years a complete rewiring of infrastructure of delivering productsn america to potential downsides of like what are the those warehouses. The workers in it is the ease of that of the e that made that happen so fast that we cannot reckon with those changes in time to really think, is this the world we want to build . The Facebook Like button, this is a picture from the rohingya massacre. And again started with this ia were going to put positivity in the wor in the lightest possible way. And the scaly and ease of that interface did not allow us to take the time and wonder what the same for the entire world to be so connected in a way theyve never beenonnected before. And, of course, apple which put the iphone a all of our hands and is now busy rewiring the way we interact with each other in space. So here is the coming challenge from this world that im trying to paint here is that we have to tackle contradictions headon. This sounds like a panacea, but one of tngs i want to point out is that every generation deals with conflicts with tensions that result in a new things that they make. In this case you have t ask the question how do you connect and i will say p, preserve, or sovereignty but also connect with people around you. These are tensions the use from the world has been great for us and introduced. We have to ask how do we promote both speech and truth . Questions in the user from the world, opposition the userfriendly world put in front of us that when you have to answer. And how to make things both easy and easy to question mark this is may be the hardest thing, how do you make things easy to use but also easy to secondguess. Theres a world in which may be the platforms that are around us become a a little more open to question and a little bit more amenable to change. The point here is again, the underlying principle of what makes things userfriendly still remain important for the world where trying to make. Onef those principles, this idea feedback, the idea you to be able to do something and get a response and that feedback between input and output that changes your behavior is something that designers create everyday. Most new technology typically come from new feedback loops put in the world that were not there before and some of the feedback loops that we need to create are turning knowledge into action, example the issue of climate change. How can downstrm impacts be felt in tim toct . And another point is putting higher goals and a product or one of the ways in which Product Design which was privileged on the idea that you could make clickable interaction that was sitting right in front of the user into something thats a little easier and easier to manage that sort of mrs. Agee of like okay, like this thing is easy for me in a moment of what is it i really want and what values do i really believe in . You could make a cheeseburger easy to access for you just available on demand all the time but theres a sense of which like thats not good for you in the long term and you know its not. How would we put those higher order values in the products we have . And do our products to express what we want . And then finally this thing i want to leave you guys with is how do you square the difrence between what y you want and what you actually need facts thats the end of my talk. Robert can talk a little bit and then open it up for questions. Thank you, guys. [applause] i first want to thank cliff for forget way to summarize so much, not just the conceptual stuff but actual history vote into the presentation and the way its report in such a phenomenal way. Can you hear me . Sorry. I often feel like im a l little bit operating in a funny sort of twilight z zone episode which is that for choices i made 25 or 30 years ago i got to experience some of tse changes. At a much slower pace in almost a footround me. The book, that title came from a i had with my dad who is about to turn 89. He was fiddling with this own for the millionth time and he finally dropp it on the table and said i dont understand. Its supposed to be so damned userfriendly. I thought this is the word is reach my 86yearold father sixyearold father. Something happen in our culture that made a set of ideas urgent for us and also quite confusing. If you think about the timescale of what were all trying to absorb in the last ten years, and some ways its been a privilege to sorort of see this build like a settlement over a longer te. I know there are a couple of people here in the room, i saw liz walk in. Dando, i dont know if youre still here, who cant rember when the committee, they give out the stuff is pretty small. I remember when i first started doing this design work i call a cab one generation removed frorm things like what felt like the origin o of lot of this thinkin. I dont know, how many people have a c copy of the apple human interface guidelines . I see a few hands gop. I could reject an almost touch it. Someone i couould meet, worked n that design team. It was like you could touch it. Bill buxton who you spent a while talking to, almost had a chapter to himself, but didnt quite make it. Hes the guy who stripling around with multitouch because he was a drummer. He loved drumming. For a for a company back in they 90s. You could reach out and touch all the stuff and yet the truth is, over 25 years its taking a long time to realize theres an much deeper history and thats why came to cliff with is how to bring the future together. I had my own pieces of it that i had self assembled and fnd over time, but it was totally incomplete and one of the many threads cliff have reported on, not just to capture that but you really kind to bring it to life. For me thats the purpose. My wife always ask me whats the service . The service herere is to bring that history back up to the president for everybody in this room, for everybody that i know. Because the end of the day we are left with a set of choices not just on how we made by our Christmas Gifts i week or t twon amazon but increasingly how the same systems are going to shape the way we vote, the wa

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