Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
Sat, 10 May 2025
If someone tells you how a book or movie ends - does it spoil the whole thing? Is it not worth watching or reading it? Or could knowing the ending first make the experience even better? Listen and find out. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/spoiler-alert-spoilers-make-you-enjoy-stories-more You may not remember this but about 20 years ago, personal computers and other electronic devices came with big instruction manuals. Of course, now they don’t. We expect computers and just about everything else today to be user-friendly. Instructions should be minimal. This idea of “user-friendly” and the desire for a “positive user experience” is a fairly new thing that we can trace back to a point in time not very long ago. Cliff Kuang is a user experience designer and author of the book User Friendly: How the hidden rules of design are changing the way we live, work, and play (https://amzn.to/37T1Vi0). Listen as he explores the evolution from complicated to easy – which is just the way we like it. Should you bother trying to change someone’s mind? After all, we know arguing doesn’t work and neither does rational explanation. Perhaps it just isn’t worth the effort – we should just let people believe what they want to believe. Eleanor Gordon Smith has researched this topic and written a book about it called Stop Being Reasonable: How We Really Change Our Minds (https://amzn.to/2R9OxQQ). Listen as she explains her research on why changing someone’s mind is so difficult. In almost every workplace, some people complain that it is too hot while others say it is too cold. Regardless of your position on the subject, there is a way to feel comfortable no matter where the thermostat says. Listen to the explanation. is. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/09/office-too-cold-shoes/502184 PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at https://FactorMeals.com/something50off TIMELINE: Get 10% off your order of Mitopure! Go to https://Timeline.com/SOMETHING INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING right now! QUINCE: Elevate your shopping with Quince! Go to https://Quince.com/sysk for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! SHOPIFY: Nobody does selling better than Shopify! Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk and upgrade your selling today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Does knowing the ending ruin a story?
I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.
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Today on Something You Should Know, does knowing the ending of a book or movie ahead of time really spoil it or make it better? Then, as consumers, we want a better user experience.
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.
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Chapter 2: Why did instruction manuals disappear?
Also, a simple solution if your workplace is either too hot or too cold. And what does it take to get someone to change their mind?
The things that stood out to me in the research were things like who we believe, things like how we see ourselves, our own picture of our own identity, the things that we hope for, things that we wish were true. These kinds of things went into the ways that people change their minds in really quite surprising ways.
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something you should know fascinating intel the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today something you should know with mike carruthers hi and welcome to something you should know we start today with a spoiler alert alert
People seem to be very concerned and really don't want to know how a story or a movie or a book ends before they read it. Because the theory is that if you know the ending first, that will somehow spoil the experience of reading the book or watching the movie or the TV show. Well, researchers put this idea to the test. Two groups of people were asked to read a best-selling book.
One group had to read the ending first. And it turned out that that group, the group that knew how the story ended, actually enjoyed reading the book more. The researchers say that's because when we know the ending, it allows us to focus more on things like deeper meanings, plots, acting, and writing ability, and appreciate some of the nuances that we might have otherwise missed.
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Chapter 3: How did World War II change user experience design?
So what happened? What happened around World War Two that brought to light this whole idea of the user experience?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, it's pretty interesting when you think about it that more or less the world was simple enough up till then, or sort of up till then, that we didn't really have to discuss this because things were simpler. And then this new technology comes in and then all of a sudden it's like, well, people don't really know how to Use this. All of a sudden, the world started to get more complicated.
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.
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Chapter 4: What can we learn from the evolution of technology?
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.
And so what does this mean to people? Is this all good news?
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.
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?
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?
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.
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?
There's also the creep factor that because this machine seems to know what I want before I want it, that kind of creeps me out.
One example of what you're talking about would be this really interesting experiment that's happening at Carnival, right?
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Chapter 5: Is technology making us less competent?
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?
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
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?
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.
Well, Alexa's a good example. I mean, people always feared that people could listen in what's going on in your house. Then it turns out people were listening in, but nobody really seems to care.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 6: Should everything be user-friendly?
For me, the interest in how people change their minds is really quite a personal one. And it started, I guess, about three years ago now when I started working on this catcalling social experiment. And basically, the idea was that I would go out. I'm a radio reporter in a previous life. And the idea was that I would go out and take a recorder and a microphone and a certain amount of
familiar skills as an interviewer and I would go out and I would try to interview men who cackled me and more specifically I would try to change their minds.
I would wait for them to yell something kind of vulgar or sexual or crass or you know just the stupid things that men yell when they're hanging out of the windows of cars or they've had a couple drinks and I'd go over and I'd say like come back, tell me what you just said, tell me what you were hoping for when you said it and most importantly tell me what I would need to say in order to get you to change your mind about that.
And this was an idea for the radio program This American Life. We thought it would be a kind of fairly simple mission to try to get some good tape of interactions with these men, a bit of a disagreement. And it turned out to be far more complicated than I thought it would be.
I have a bit of a background in high school debate and critical thinking and argument construction and those sorts of formal tasks where you spend a lot of time doing rigorous argument construction. So I went in honestly pretty cocky. I felt like this would be...
fairly straightforward for someone with my kind of training to be able to pull off it sounds like the hubris on that as I say it now makes me embarrassed and in fact what happened was I spent close to six weeks walking around talking to cat callers and just having no success whatsoever just being unable to get them to understand that they were doing something that most women don't enjoy.
And it really started out for me, this journey into thinking like, when people do change their minds, what is it that manages to get through to them? Because everything I thought could get through to these men turned out not to.
And so when you asked these men who were whistling at you and saying vulgar things, when you asked them, what is it you're hoping to get from this? What's the outcome that you desire from this? What did they say?
They said this really weird kind of mash of things. So I actually wound up getting quite different answers to this from different guys. Some of them said that they were looking for a relationship, like they genuinely wanted to meet their girlfriend by yelling something at her in the street. Others of them were a little more like playful about it.
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