Operations research (military logistics, mapping shipping routes, calculating trucking loads)
Early demand (1960s) for computing power and software design:
military
shipping
transportation
Steve Jobs: the computer as ‘a bicycle for the mind’
Immediate feedback How does the minicomputer running APL (A Programming Language) differ from the supercomputer down the hall at the IMB research facility?
“proposed that a computer program be gauged not just on how well it solved a problem but on how easy it made the lives of the people trying to solve it.”
“In an era in which 2.5 billion people own smartphones, user experience now occupies the center of modern life, remaking not just our digital lives but also business, society, even philanthropy.” (pg. 9)
Do you agree that “user experience now occupies the center of modern life”?
“We now expect that the tools we use to diagnose cancer or to identify a problem with an airplane engine will be as simple to use as Angry Birds. We aren’t wrong to do so. Technology should become simpler over time. Then it should become simpler still, so that it disappears from notice. This has already happened with stunning speed, and that transformation is one of the greatest cultural achievements of the last fifty years.” (pg. 10)
In what ways can we cite specific examples of technology “dissappearing from notice”?
“But even as the designed world shapes us, its inner logic remains almost totally absent from daily conversation. Instead, whether we’re speaking to our kids or speaking to our grandparents, the only words we have are ‘user friendly.’ We hardly examine them at all—and yet they’re the standard by which we judge the designed world.” (pg. 10)
Do you agree that the popular discourse is lacking articulation and critical analysis around user experience design?
A “litany of questions” (pg. 10):
Why should some product defer to our desires?
How does the person who created that object come to understand what I want to begin with?
What can go wrong in translating our desires into artifacts?
“The great chain of ideas that spawned [user experience design] typically hasn't been appreciated as a tapestry of personalities, haрpenstance, and ideological struggle.” (pg. 11)
What do you think could be the “ideological struggle” that Kuang and Fabricant are identitfying?
“All told, there are eleven hundred dials, gauges, and switch indicators,and more than six hundred warning lights. At this moment, it seems like every one of them is wailing. Theroom is buried in noise. Here, at a critical moment, the machine is generating not just noise but chaos in the minds of its operators. The taint of that chaos will linger for hours.” (pg. 16)
Can you think of any experiences from your own life in which the communication failures of a complicared system caused an error or mistake?
“Hurriedly, the men switch off the emergency pumps, to keep them from adding more water to the core. It will turn out to be the day's single worst decision…” (pg. 18)
Why was turning off the emergency pumps at TMI the worst decision?
“The machine might have been made differently, with some greater awareness of how too much information and too little meaning can overwhelm the humans who are supposed to be in control. Instead, the machine and the human couldn't speak to each other in a language that each could understand. They were opposed in ways that no one in the moment could appreciate. The story of that opposition carries on today.“ (pg. 21)
IDEO (1991, David Kelley, Bill Moggridge, Mike Nuttall)
“Design thinking is now marshaled to solve myriad problems at every scale. What was once a niche profession more commonly associated with chairs is now talked of as a solution to the world's ills, simply because of a shift in perspective” (pg. 24)
Don Norman on Three Mile Island: “There wasn't any understanding of technology combined with psychology. We were building technology for people, but the technologists didn't understand people." (pg. 25)
“The most consequential assumption behind all his work is that even if human error is to blame, it is hard to imagine any human not making these errors. Humans might fail—but they are not wrong. And if you try to mirror their thinking a little, even the stupidest and strangest things that people do have their own indelible logic. You have to know why people behave as they do—and design around their foibles and limitations, rather than some ideal.” (pg. 26)
“It was perhaps only natural that as the smartphone came to take over our everyday lives, the principles that had created it would come to seem like the answers not just to problems of the moment (How do I get people to understand this app?) but to problems of the era (How do I get people to understand their health care?).” (pg. 26)
Three Mile Island: “The PORV (pilot-operated release valve) light was designed around a deep conceptual error” (pg. 28)
What is the conceptual error of the PORV?
Do you agree that “Three Mile Island the biggest design failure in American history.”? (pg. 29)
“Swaddled in a fog of misdirection, they made catastrophic choices. The plant and the men were talking past each other: The plant hadn't been designed to anticipate the imaginations of men; the men couldn't imagine the workings of a machine.” (pg. 30)
Mental model: “When something works well enough for you to predict what it'll do next, you eventually form a mental model of it. That mental model can be deep or shallow-it might vary from just a sense that this button does that, to a picture in your head about how your hybrid car charges its battery. But those mental models are knowingly crafted by the designers who put interfaces in front of you.” (pg. 31)
Norbert Wiener (1940) MIT, feedback: “And yet feedback is what turns any man-made creation into an object that you relate to, one that might evoke feelings of ease or ire, satisfaction or frustration. These are the bones of our relationship with the world around us.” (pg. 34)
“Is there any problem in which our behavior doesn't match how we'd like to live that isn't a feedback problem?” (pg. 34)
Are all problems due to feedback?
Healthcare
Climate change
“There may be no greater design challenge for the twenty-first century than creating better, tighter feedback loops in places where they don't exist, be they in the environment, health care, or government.” (pg. 34)
Buyer/seller feedback (eBay), Like button (Facebook)
What other examples can you think of in which feedback generates trust?
Do you agree that user feedback has replaced brand as a source for consumer trust? (pg. 35)
Instagram (2010) vs. Snapchat (2011)
How did each app treat feedback differently?
Instagram Stories (2016) is designed to counteract what user experience tendency?
“You could talk about Snapchat and Instagram as the story of two billion-dollar apps that gave people new ways to entertain themselves, and one another. Instagram had started to become the equivalent of an art gallery. Snapchat had become a spontaneous goof for your friends. The difference between those two businesses was really the story of the differing experiences that feedback could produce.” (pg. 37)
“Mental models are nothing more and nothing less than the intuitions we have about how something works — how its pieces and functions fit together. They're based on the things we've used before; you might describe the entire task of user experience as the challenge of fitting a new product to our mental models of how things should work.” (pg. 41)
How had mental modeling been used to improve the user experience of control room at Three Mile Island?
“Push the button, provide feedback, confirm the action. Like a button. The creation of a shared understanding precedes any infuence we might wield upon the world. Design is nothing more-and nothing less-than creating artifacts imbued with such shared understanding, legible to their users.” (pg. 42)
“There are many ways to make something work—deciding which one is right is another thing entirely. There's a psychology to design, but there's also art in it, and a culture, too. Design presumes that we can make objects humane, but doing so requires a different way of seeing the world.” (pg. 46)
How do you interpret this observation? In what ways do you think designing “requires a different way of seeing the world”