User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play

A century-spanning history of how user-experience design quietly rewired the made world, and the hidden rules it runs on. A readable account of the SDF's procedural facet — the methods that became so standard we stopped noticing them. Cliff Kuang, a journalist, and Robert Fabricant, a pioneering interaction designer, trace how user-experience design has shaped modern life over the past century, running through events such as the fight for women's rights, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the rise of digital technology. The book maps what it calls the hidden rules of the designed world, including the largely invisible assumption that machines should anticipate what people need, and follows that assumption across physical products, digital interfaces and everyday experiences.