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

cliff kuang is an award-winning journalist and UX designer. He was previously the head of UX at Fast Company, as well as its design editor. In that role, he founded Co.Design, one of the worlds leading design publications.

robert fabricant is the former vice president of creative for Frog Design, one of the leading industrial design studios of the past fifty years, and is an award-winning cofounder and partner at Dalberg Design.

For my wife and daughter

CLIFF

To my family and friends Hopefully this will explain once and for all what I do every day, and why it matters

ROBERT

1. Computing. Of hardware or software: easy to use or understand, esp. by an inexperienced user; designed with the needs of a user in mind.

2. In extended use: easy to use; accessible, manageable.

At only four stories tall, the worlds largest office building sits low to the ground but commands a footprint worthy of a UFO that could blot out the sun: a perfect doughnut shape, a mile around its edge. In the middle lies a grove meant to recall the time, just fifty years ago, when Silicon Valley wasnt Silicon Valley, but rather the Valley of Hearts Delight, covered in 10 million fruit treesapricot, cherry, peach, pear, and apple. It took Apple, the computing giant, years to buy up all that land in secret, assembling some sixteen different plots across fifty acres in a $5 billion jigsaw. If the building looks like a spaceship, then its one that lifted off directly from Steve Jobss imagination to land in the heart of an otherwise sleepy suburb. It was one of the last undertakings that the great man signed off on before he died.

Every morning during the construction of Jobss last dream, Harlan Crowder woke up to the dull roar of heavy trucks on their way to the site, their alarms bleating as they nudged their loads into place. When we met, Crowder was seventy-three years old with three grown children. He wore a white goatee and a retirees wardrobe of rumpled pants and floral shirts. In Crowders neighborhood, the hubbub attending Apple Campus 2s arrival had unleashed a swarm of real estate agents trawling door-to-door and offering to make people rich.

These agents were mostly women buffed to a high gloss, and they came adorned in big brass jewelry that served as armor against holdouts like Crowder. There was one, she said it just like that: I have ten people waiting to start a bidding war for your house, Crowder said in his Texas drawl as we sat talking on his back patio. Houses like his had originally been built in the 1960s for the population boom incited by the nascent transistor industry. When I visited, modest three-bedroom ranch houses like Crowders were easily fetching $2.5 million. In a year, he assumed it could be 10 percent higher, maybe more. It was all some strange dream.

Crowder isnt a famous personthere are untold thousands like him, spread out in the Valley: people of technical ability who built the place but whose names are lost to history. But Crowder is one of the first people in the annals of history to use the term user friendly to refer to a computer. Every week or so, Crowder fends off the real estate agents and their offers of a multimillion-dollar payday. Apple fuels it allApple, the company that made user friendly into an idea that we live with every day.

Crowder looks on at the new Apple Park during his daily walks past the campus, the crown jewel in an empire built upon trillions of dollars in iPods and iMacs and iPads and Apple Watches and iPhonesdevices that, despite being some of the most advanced computers ever made, can still be operated by toddlers. Their power dwarfs that of the supercomputers Crowder once worked with at IBM. That hed come to IBM at all seemed like another kind of dream. Hed failed eighth-grade algebra. After high school, he bummed around until enlisting in the Army, where he trained as a medic: a year and a half of doctors training with all the theory stripped out, so that you simply knew the essentials required to save a life. The practicality and the pressure lit into him. The one-time layabout graduated first in his class. After service came college at East Texas State University, in Commerce. It wasnt the edge of nowhere, but you could see the edge, he told me.

Crowder had seen an IBM recruitment flyer on a bulletin board at college, calling for science majors to enter a newfangled training program. He replied, and they called him back. He flew up to Yorktown, New York, without much idea of what to expect. IBMs research center was a crescent-shaped architectural landmark designed by the great Finnish American designer Eero Saarinenthe original corporate-campus-as-spaceship. Its facade was a gleaming curved-glass curtain wall, and the walls inside were hewn from New Yorks native granite. The buildings design was a statement about the modern workplace from the worlds smartest company, with as many Ph.D.s on staff as a university.

Crowder walked to his job interview in awe. The building resembled nothing so much as the spaceship from 2001, a bright techno future that was big news in 1968. Here was a place where the water-cooler conversations were about scientific breakthroughs. Id have done anything to work there. I didnt care if I had to clean the toilets, Crowder said, his voice still shimmering with glee. IBM had run out of computer programmers, and the company wanted to make more of them. Crowder got the job, and he took to the pragmatic nature of the work, using computers to solve real-world problems that you could measure by the ton, such as mapping shipping routes and calculating trucking loads. He found that he had a mind for visualizing the complex equations his job required.

The field where Crowder worked, operations research, began with World War II and the Marshall Plan. Rebuilding Europe meant shipping a mind-boggling amount of matriel across the Atlantic, but also shipping back a mind-boggling amount of matriel that had accumulated in dozens of countries during a war effort of unprecedented scale. Loading ships efficiently on the way over, then loading them up efficiently for the return home, was a math problem whose unruly complexity demanded computing power.

Crowder was working on these sorts of operational problems for IBMs clients in the 1960s. To create a computer program, he had to use a machine to punch intricate holes in cards the size of an airplane boarding pass. When he was done, he couldnt just walk up to the computer himself. The computer was a $5 million machineabout $35 million in todays moneypatrolled by two security guards and a perky-eared German shepherd. Crowder would spend all day programming and then take his stack of cards to the computer attendant behind a window, who fed the cards into the machine. The computer would spend all night calculating, and the results would usually be ready for Crowder by the morningif he hadnt made a mistake. This was a big if. A mistake would be as simple as a misplaced character that gummed up the processing, or a poorly defined equation that divided by zero and sent the computer into looping infinities. (Shades of Apple again: The address of its former campus is One Infinite Loop.)