I Just Read User Friendly by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant

And I loved it. This book is no essay, but a compilation of well crafted stories that together explain the pervasiveness of user friendliness as an ideal in our technology-rich world.

Kuang and Fabricant begin at an electrifying and tense point in history by first focusing on the crisis at Three Mile Island where an accident nearly led to a nuclear meltdown at a US nuclear power plant. Due to poor system feedback and a confusing layout for controls, workers were unable to accurately determine the system's state and failed to unearth the real issue behind the plant's problems. The authors later reveal this event to be the impetus for some UX figures to dedicate their career to solving usability issues. One such figure is Don Norman, who wrote another one of my favorite books: The Design of Everday Things.

Rather than focusing purely on the present and recent past, I appreciated Kuang and Fabricant's insistance on presenting the history of "user friendliness" in totality, explaining aspects of Three Mile Island I had no knowledge of, and telling stories like of Henry Dreyfuss. He was a pioneering industrial designer during the Great Depression who dedicated his life to improving experiences using household items like washing machines, peanut butter jars, and thermostats, long before user experience became a field.

In my opinion, this is an easy, automatic recommendation to anyone who works in tech, especially those that contribute directly to crafting the experience of end users.