User Friendly

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

The audiobook edition of User Friendly by
Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant.

USER FRIENDLY is a must-read for anyone who loves well-designed products—and for the innovators aspiring to make them.


It seems like magic when some new gadget seems to know what we want before we know ourselves. But why does some design feel intrinsically good, and why do some designs last forever, while others disappear? User Friendly guides readers through the hidden rules governing how design shapes our behaviour, told through fascinating stories such as what the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island reveals about the logic of the smartphone; how the pressures of the Great Depression and World War II created our faith in social progress through better product design; and how a failed vision for Disney World yielded a new paradigm for designed experience.

Critics Review

  • A tour de force, an engrossing fusion of scholarly research, professional experience and revelations from intrepid firsthand reporting

    New York Times
  • Engrossing and rich with rarely-told stories and interviews, User Friendly gives critical insights to make us better, smarter consumers of design and user-friendly experiences. A must-read for anyone who cares about design and the challenges it has to meet in the coming decades

    Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb
  • User Friendly starts with the fascinating arc of design in the industrial age, when fortunes could be made by looking more deeply at how we live. But this book brings those insights into the touchscreen age, in which our devices and interfaces sometimes seem to know us better than we know ourselves. Anyone who cares about the fraught but increasingly urgent role that design plays in our lives owes it to themselves to read this hugely compelling book

    Scott Dadich, creator of Abstract: The Art of Design and co-founder of Godfrey Dadich Partners
  • Compulsory reading for the current age, in which business and society have turned to design in pursuit of growth and change. But design means little without empathy, and this book lays out a remarkable tale of how that insight became truth. This essential work shows why design has to be at the center of the human enterprise

    Tim Brown, Chair of IDEO and author of CHANGE BY DESIGN
  • Anyone who cares about the fraught but increasingly urgent role that design plays in our lives owes it to themselves to read this hugely compelling book

    Scott Dadich, former Editor-in-Chief, Wired, and creator of ABTRACT: THE ART OF DESIGN

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