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FORTUNE.COM // JANUARY 2020
designers, aren’t trying hard enough to under-
stand how technology works and, therefore,
aren’t taking full advantage of all that it can do.
User Friendly, true to its title, is the more
accessible of the books. Kuang, a former Fast
Company editor, weaves a vivid narrative of
the rise of human-centric design that readers
won’t require design expertise to appreciate.
The idea that designers must understand
and empathize with users of their products
and services is by now so pervasive it seems
obvious. But producers haven’t always be-
lieved in putting people first. Kuang traces the
idea of “user-friendliness” to the dawn of the
Machine Age around the turn of the 20th cen-
tury. At the time, design’s dominant ethos was
anything but human-centric: Management
experts like Frederick Winslow Taylor sought
to modify human behavior to maximize the
efficiency of machines in factories, while
industrial titans like Henry Ford displayed a
gleeful disregard for customers.
Kuang hails the efforts of the Bauhaus move-
ment to reunite art and functional design, and
the success of designers like Raymond Loewy
and Norman Bel Geddes in dazzling customers
with sleek contours and the allure of moder-
nity. But he has special affection for Henry
Dreyfuss who, from humble beginnings as a
Broadway set designer, became the first Ameri-
can industrial designer to insist that design
had to be grounded in an understanding of the
person meant to use the product.
Kuang shows how that new focus helped
designers stoke consumption after the Great
Depression, improve the performance of
fighter pilots and tank commanders during
the two World Wars, and emerge as powerful
players in the digital revolution. He follows
the career of Donald A. Norman, who led a
congressional investigation into what went
wrong at Three Mile Island, invented the term
“user experience,” and was eventually hired by
Steve Jobs to work at Apple.
User Friendly is especially good in describ-
ing the triumph of human-centric design in
Silicon Valley. Kuang chronicles the rise of
IDEO, the consultancy that helped develop
the first computer mouse, coined the term
“design thinking,” and created the early cur-
riculum for the Stanford d.school. Sections
on design at Apple and Facebook benefit
from extensive interviews. Kuang is an ac-
complished designer, but his book’s greatest
strengths are his thorough reporting and
skillful storytelling.
The moral of most of Kuang’s stories is that
products and services must be
adapted, dumbed down even,
to accommodate the quirks and
foibles of the people who use
them. The goal, Kuang sug-
gests, is to render even the most
complicated technologies so
intuitive that users can under-
stand them without instruction
or training. “Technology should
get simpler over time,” he de-
clares. “Then it should become
simpler still so that it disap-
pears from notice.”JOHN MAEDA SHOWS little patience
for that view. The problem, as
he sees it, isn’t that technology is
too complicated; it’s that humans
aren’t keeping up. Designers who
insist that man must be the mea-
sure of all things aren’t helping.
Maeda brings a unique
perspective to the debate. He’s
a classically trained graphic de-
signer, a former president of the
Rhode Island School of Design,
and author of the influential
Design in Tech Report. But he’s
also a computer science expert
who has taught at MIT’s Idea
Lab and held senior positions
at eBay and venture capital pio-
neer Kleiner Perkins. In August,
he assumed a new role as chief
experience officer at Publicis
Sapient, the tech consulting
arm of the global marketing and
communications giant.
In How to Speak Machine,
Maeda heaps scorn on classical
designers who cling to the tra-
ditional view that the designer’s
role is to create perfect, finished
objects suitable for curation in
a museum. In the digital age, he argues, the
most powerful designs will be imperfect and
incremental—each one what engineers call a
minimum viable product, meant to be “flung
out into the world and later modified by ob-
serving how it survives in the wild.”
In such a world, Maeda suggests, designers
who can’t “speak machine” will be relegated
to a supporting role, while techies, whose
“tired fingers can push back against the many
dams of chaos and complexity,” will prove the
unsung heroes.WHAT KIND
OF DESIGNER
ARE YOU?
Tech and design guru
John Maeda taxono-
mizes designers into
three categories.
Business leaders
may find that their
problem-solving
styles overlap with
one or more of the
descriptions.“CLASSICAL”
DESIGNERS create
physical objects or
products for a spe-
cific group of people,
usually with an end-
goal of a single tangi-
ble product in mind.
This is the approach
taught in traditional
design schools.“COMMERCIAL”
DESIGNERS seek
insights into how
customers interact
with products and
services, and in-
novate based on that
knowledge. The idea
of “design thinking”
is associated with
this category.“COMPUTATIONAL”
DESIGNERS use pro-
gramming skills and
data to attempt to
quickly satisfy users.
These practitioners
often deploy imper-
fect or incremental
designs, and modify
them after seeing
how they perform.