How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
May 10, 2025•53 min•Ep. 1202
Episode description
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
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