"User Friendly is a tour de force, an engrossing fusion of scholarly research, professional experience and revelations from intrepid firsthand reporting."
EDWARD TENNER, The New York Times Book Review
We suddenly find ourselves in a world that has been dramatically re-factored before our eyes, like magic. The principles of user friendly design have seeped out of our digital devices and into every nook and cranny of our day to day lives from how we commute to how we vote to how we get pregnant.
But where did these design ideas come from? Good luck asking a designer. We all think that user experience design was invented by Steve Jobs. The origin story is both more unusual and compelling, touching everything from the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster to the invention of the Princess Phone. So I reached out to Cliff Kuang, the only writer I knew capable of reporting and capturing this paradigm shift for a broad audience. The result is the book User Friendly which he so eloquently crafted and which I am proud to have helped bring to life. We hope our readers will become more discriminating consumers of all of the new experiences being designed into their day-to-day lives. The book was selected by Amazon as one of the Top 100 books for 2019 (#98); a New York Times, Amazon and Time Magazine pick of the month; and one of Fortune Magazine’s Favorite Books of 2019.
“Very rarely, but sometimes, you pick up a book and realize you’ve been looking at the world all wrong. That’s what happened to me when I picked up User Friendly, a fascinating book about the history of user-experience design.”
AMAZON best books of 2019 (#98)
“This book offers a history of user-centered design that’s delightfully true to its title. The stories it tells are thoughtfully organized, rigorously reported, and deftly presented.”
Fortune Magazine Favorite Books of 2019
“An erudite and insightful exploration of a revolution in human thinking that most people have probably never considered.”
Publisher’s Weekly
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