Cliff Kuang
Appearances
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
I'm not really sure. I don't think anybody is sure exactly how this is going to evolve, right? Because like, I'll just give you an example. You know, the things that we used to find creepy like five or 10 years ago are now just part of everyday life, right?
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
The fact that, you know, you can go to a maps app and have your location log there and have your favorite spots already marked on the map, for example, or your friends might know exactly where you are down to your GPS location, right? Those things were completely off the table 10 years ago. But what's happened in the last 10 years is we've recognized the utility. And so we've made this transition
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
this trade-off between privacy and utility, and we're making it constantly, right? And so the question of where we draw the line ultimately is going to be decided not by governments and not by technology companies. It's going to be decided by people deciding whether or not they're getting enough utility in return for the data that they're sharing, right?
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And that's a negotiation, I think, that it's up to us to be conscious consumers of and be advocating for and being vocal about what we want and where we draw those lines.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
Yeah, so that's the funny thing, right? There's a difference between what the media narrative is about we should be concerned about this. There's a difference between saying, like, people saying, I am concerned about this. And there's a difference between that and people essentially acting upon it, right? What it tells me is that we're just not done with the debate.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
Part of it is that consumers don't necessarily know what the alternative is. And part of it is there's not necessarily a lot of alternatives in the market out there right now. I think what's interesting is that you're now seeing more and more of this debate being waged out in the public with other companies saying, hey, I do this, but in a privacy-centric way.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
Or I do this, but I don't record your calls or I do this and I don't record your location or your browsing history. And we're seeing whether or not those businesses are going to be successful. Right.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
It's going to we're going to see this at scale, whether or not people understand the benefits enough and whether or not the benefits are clear enough that they maybe take a chance on a smaller competitor or a smaller provider.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
You're making a really interesting point. And so in the case of the Honeywell Round, you know, there's a good reason that that's one of the best selling designs in the history of American industrial design. And it is that like there's a one to one correspondence between everything that thermostat does and everything it's showing you an interface. Right.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
There's kind of honesty there that I think that is becoming more challenging to deliver when these machines have so much capability wrapped into, like, let's say, a single readout.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
all these algorithms and learning settings and all these kinds of things that are built into these very, very almost oversimplified readouts that sort of hide a lot of the complexity and capability of what these machines do. And that's attention, right?
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
It's like how much do you reveal to the user so that they can adjust things and have it be understood versus how much do you hide so that they can just get to exactly what the thing needs to be doing. And that is like the real challenge of design in the 21st century.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And that's in one of the ways in which I'm optimistic about what this world of technology is bringing to us, right? We're bringing new expectations. You know, look at what's happened to TV companies and how they're being disintermediated, right?
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
They're essentially being disintermediated because, you know, people like Netflix and Amazon and Apple are coming along with more user friendly, simpler to access, easier to understand offerings that also provide much more inventory than let's say your TV channels do, right?
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And so that sort of same sense, the ways in which the cable industry is being rewired by consumer expectation is something that I expect to see. And then, in fact, we're already seeing in things like utilities, things like insurance, all these like gnarly complex industries that people have not changed or seen as being centers of innovation for decade upon decade, right, are now booming.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
They are waking up and looking in the mirror and saying, how do I update my service for the way the coming generations think about technology and the way those coming generations think about how services should work?
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
Because I don't think it's tenable if you're a giant insurance company to say, oh, we're going to make this generation of 15-year-olds interact with our insurance company in the same way that their grandparents do. They just won't stand for it.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
This is actually something that comes up in the annals of technology, right? You know, and the example actually comes directly from airplanes once again. And I think that what you're describing is called the automation paradox. And the way this works is the following. So you add automation to the way an airplane works in order to make that airplane easier and safer to fly, right?
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
But in doing so, the pilots now no longer have to work as hard to fly that plane. And so they make errors that they didn't make before. And so to compensate for those errors, you have to add more automation, right? And so you get into this spiral where the pilots get less and less competent and the plane gets more and more automated.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And therefore, the pilots get less and less capable of flying that plane. And so I think that what you're describing is a world in which we're essentially doing a little bit of that ourselves, right? You can imagine like just to take this forward in a very clear way, like driverless cars, right?
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
What happens when our cars start being able to stop themselves at red lights, start being able to drive themselves along the highway, start being able to take exits off the highway and take lefts and rights and through the city and all these kinds of things. What kind of drivers will we be then when the machine is doing so much of it? Right.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And so there's this sense that you actually you can't automate your way to the future. You actually have to keep humans in the loop, able to be honing their skills, able to making decisions so that when the time comes and it really matters, they actually have that acumen and the training to do something correctly. Right.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And so I think that there's a world in which we thought that a lot of these driverless cars and all this kind of stuff would just arrive one day. And it turns out that it's going to be much more messy than that because you know, a lot of what technology should do is not just like take jobs away from us as humans, but actually make us more capable at the jobs that we want to still be doing.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And so that tension is one that I think that we're going to be living with more and more as the pace of technological change increases.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
Right. I mean, you know, so there's this interesting thing is that like it's easy when it's all on the human. It's easy when it's all on the machine. Where it gets hard is all the places in between, all those steps in between where you have to negotiate who's in charge and what do you need? Like what information does the person need and what happens when one needs to take over from the other?
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And so, you know, we've been negotiating that really like that fuzziness for a long time now. And I think that we're going to be negotiating that fuzziness for a long time still.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
Thanks, Mike. It was a pleasure, and it was really fun talking to you.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
Hi, thanks for having me.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
Machines in some way had to work differently than they had worked before because of all the different technology that was coming online to help Americans fight in the in the war. And all that technology coming online with all these new users made people think about technology in a fundamentally different way.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
So I guess one of the things that people noticed in World War II is that none of the machines were performing nearly as well as people had promised they would, right? So they would come back with numbers saying the bomb should be this accurate and the plane should be flying at this efficiency rate, etc., etc., etc. And none of those numbers turned out to be happening.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
None of those numbers turned out to be true. And so the Army actually, the Air Force, set about figuring out exactly why this was. And it turned out, more often than not, it was that people and machines were not interacting well, right? People did not know how to use the machines in some way. And people didn't have a very good understanding of what was going on.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And so this generation of psychologists were essentially tasked to figure it out. And what they realized was that it wasn't so much that the human beings weren't, quote unquote, trained to use the machines well enough, which is what a lot of people thought was the case. It was the machines in some way were impossible to use.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And in one famous instance in World War II, it turned out that there was something almost 500 crashes within a span of 22 months, all caused because the wing flaps and the landing gear in a particular plane, the B-17, were almost identical. So that when people come in to land these planes, they would, for example, hit the wing flaps, meaning to push the landing gear, and end up causing a crash.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And so therefore, in some ways, the machine had to be bent around the man as opposed to people being trained to use more and more complicated machines. And we live with that fundamental shift in thinking to this day.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
We've demanded it, so much so that what used to come with instruction manuals doesn't come with them anymore because now we're building up this pattern language. of, you know, this should work like this thing, and this is familiar because you've used this other thing, like the instruction manual essentially has gone away.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And what was interesting at the time is that, you know, if you were in the Air Force and the Army at the time, you know, this is actually the beginning of IQ tests in the military, which was like they were intensively testing all these different soldiers, hoping that they could fit them into exactly the perfect job. Right. And it turns out that that doesn't work.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
It turns out that no matter how well trained somebody is, they're going to make mistakes. And unless you design machines to be simpler to use as opposed to being more complex and therefore requiring more training, you can't solve that problem.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And so that shift in thinking, which I call a real paradigm shift that's unappreciated, really set in motion a lot of the ways that we look at technology today. You know, for example, assuming that things shouldn't come with instruction manuals or assuming that things should be able to be used without you ever having to really be told explicitly how to use them.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
I traced this change to back to the Macintosh computer. Right. And so some 35 years after that insight first landed, um, in the cockpits of B 17 bombers and psychologists started figuring out this idea of bending the machine to the man. You actually get the first Macintosh that Apple creates.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And in those first ads, they describe it as the computer should be taught how people work as opposed to teaching people how computers work, right? And so that idea is directly descended from that World War II insight. And what it produces is this machine that's actually meant to conform to our expectations about how a machine might work.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
based on our previous assumptions about how the world at large works. So you get things like the desktop metaphor, which helps us understand what a personal computer should do, right? And so that sets us on that path to essentially eliminating the instruction manual, right?
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
So as you mentioned, like there was an error in which computers came with all this instructions and all these kinds of things. But if you notice what Apple has done, and then successively with the iPod and the iPhone is that
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
What used to come with instruction manuals doesn't come with them anymore because now we're building up this pattern language of previous reference and, you know, this should work like this thing and this is familiar because you've used this other thing. Like, we're building on that vocabulary without us ever realizing it so that the instruction manual essentially has gone away.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
So in a previous era, you might get an instruction manual for something as simple as a VCR, right? But now... You don't get an instruction manual for an app that potentially runs your healthcare, in some cases might run an entire fleet of aircraft engines.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
You know, these things don't come with instruction manuals because of this revolution and thinking about the way technology should behave in our lives.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
Yeah, I mean, I would trace this evolution expectation to the smartphone, right? Because, you know, as you know, like there are more smartphones than people in the United States right now.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And the fact that virtually every single human being in the United States has a cell phone for them means that we bring these expectations to the most ubiquitous and personal computer of all, which is the smartphone, right?
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And so this idea that things have to be simple enough to be worked on this very limited screen in some sense, where you don't have like a full keyboard, you don't have like an entire, you know, you don't have a mouse and all these kinds of things. The idea that You need to be able to manage your life through this one tiny device has really shifted the expectations for everything else.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And so in an era in which, you know, you can have some have a company like Amazon or Uber delivered to you service with an ease that's never been seen before. We bring those expectations to all the other things in our lives because everything should be accessible right through an app or whatever. And so those expectations bleed from one arena to another.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
I think that there are pluses and minuses, right? If you ask people today, like, oh, you know, what would life be without your cell phone? People say, oh, man, it'd be so hard. I wouldn't know where to go. I wouldn't be able to keep in touch with my friends. I wouldn't be able to keep in touch with work.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And so there is this idea that things are now easier and more accessible to us than they've ever been before. But at the same time, when everything becomes simple to operate, you get into this world in which services like Facebook or whatever are trying to anticipate what you want before you even know what you want, before you even decided exactly what it is you're after, right?
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And so this world in which a lot of those assumptions are being sort of intuited and anticipated by machines is is a world in which we don't necessarily have to think as hard about what we want or how we want to act in the world. Instead, these things are in some ways being crafted by the interfaces around us. And that, I think, is the real challenge point, right?
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
Because, you know, a world in which there's no friction is a world in which everything comes to you so easily that you almost don't even have to think about it, right? But friction in some ways is the path to introspection, right? Friction is the way that we decide whether or not something is really worth having or really worth wanting.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And so when you take all that friction away, you can ask the question, what decisions aren't we making consciously? What decisions are being made for us? And how might we have made decisions differently if things weren't so easy?
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
One example of what you're talking about would be this really interesting experiment that's happening at Carnival, right?
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And what they're doing on their cruise ships is supplying all of the passengers with what they call an ocean medallion, which is essentially a Bluetooth near field communication device that allows your profile to sort of travel with you on the ship as you walk around the ship, right?
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And so your preferences, the things that you've ordered, the things that you want, the things that you've signed up for are now sort of they're invisibly trailing you as you walk through the ship, right? So that means that the crew members can say like, oh, I see you're headed to this restaurant. Do you want to go there?
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
But what's also can happen is that the screens around you can basically say, oh, here's some just suggestions for you based on this enormous, quote unquote, personal genome of your tastes and history that is essentially being tracked and updated in real time, right? And so there is a sense in which, yeah, like, People really seem to respond to that.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
You know, they like having the things that they want presented to them in the most seamless possible way. But there's a sense in which, like, you know, if you extrapolate that example out into the real world, you can ask the question, is that something you would want to be happening with your life constantly? And that seems far fetched. Right.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
Until you realize that, like, look, because of the way advertising works today, because of the way digital platforms work today. all those things happen to you almost on a minute by minute basis.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And certainly they're happening to you constantly through the websites you visit, the apps that you use, and all these kinds of invisible means of like putting things in front of you that you may not have explicitly said that you want.