The empire of user-friendliness -- Part I: Easy to use. Confusion -- Industry -- Error -- Trust -- Metaphor -- Part II: Easy to want. Empathy -- Humanity -- Personalization -- Peril -- Promise -- Seeing the world through user-friendly eyes -- Appendix: A brief history of "user friendly"

Combining the expertise and insight of a leading journalist and a pioneering designer, Kuang and Fabricant provide a definitive, thoughtful, and practical perspective on a topic that has rapidly gone from arcane to urgent to inescapable

It is a paradigm that quietly rules our modern lives: the assumption that machines should anticipate what we need. Kuang and Fabricant unpack the ways in which the world has been-- and continues to be-- remade according to the principles of the once-obscure discipline of user-experience design. They map the hidden rules of the designed world and shed light on how those rules have caused our world to change. You'll never interact with technology the same way again. -- adapted from jacket