A tour de force, an engrossing fusion of scholarly research, professional experience and revelations from intrepid firsthand reporting

Engrossing and rich with rarely-told stories and interviews, User Friendly gives critical insights to make us better, smarter consumers of design and user-friendly experiences. A must-read for anyone who cares about design and the challenges it has to meet in the coming decades

User Friendly starts with the fascinating arc of design in the industrial age, when fortunes could be made by looking more deeply at how we live. But this book brings those insights into the touchscreen age, in which our devices and interfaces sometimes seem to know us better than we know ourselves. Anyone who cares about the fraught but increasingly urgent role that design plays in our lives owes it to themselves to read this hugely compelling book

Compulsory reading for the current age, in which business and society have turned to design in pursuit of growth and change. But design means little without empathy, and this book lays out a remarkable tale of how that insight became truth. This essential work shows why design has to be at the center of the human enterprise

Anyone who cares about the fraught but increasingly urgent role that design plays in our lives owes it to themselves to read this hugely compelling book

Digital-era design has strived to eliminate the user manual: To make and sell us things that ‘just work.’ But this leaves us uncertain how things work — or why they’ve been made to work the way they do. User Friendly gives us the answers. It’s the missing manual to the designed world, and that’s just what we need

User Friendly weaves a stirring and unexpected story of how the machine age gave way to this iPhone era. Passionate and poised, Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant show us how friendliness mapped a new root structure for the simmering chaos of the recent internet

In this epic work, Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant offer us a compulsively readable successor to The Design of Everyday Things. They have crafted a definitive narrative that is as well-designed as the products that grace its pages

User-friendliness is the cognitive lubricant that makes us love the stuff we use. And yet we rarely wonder how that love was crafted. This fascinating book unveils how—and why—that love was crafted

When I had to stop, mid-reading, and send one of the stories in this book to a colleague, I knew it was instantly indispensable — whether for well-versed designers or anyone who’s ever questioned the design of everyday life. Rarely does a book have the power to turn any reader into a more conscious participant in the world around us. You need to read it

An engrossing history [and] a sprawling and multifaceted story, with side excursions into near-miss nuclear disasters, WWII fighter plane crashes, and the latest developments in driverless cars …The result is an erudite and insightful exploration of a revolution in human thinking that most people have probably never considered

a topical and essential read

This book offers a history of user-centered design that’s delightfully true to its title. The stories it tells are thoughtfully organized, rigorously reported, and deftly presented. Kuang, a journalist, and Fabricant, a designer, demonstrate the power of design—for good and evil—in everything from autos and airplanes to nuclear power plants and mobile apps

Does well to remind readers of the action that can be taken to reduce stress and be happier in our jobs

Instagram has reshaped how we eat, shop, talk and present ourselves. In No Filter . . . Sarah Frier offers a rare glimpse into how the company came to be a formidable force in the tech industry.

A lively and revealing account of how the world came to see itself through [Instagram founder] Mr Systrom's lens . . . The tale of nerds who struck gold offers glimpses of Silicon Valley's weirdness.

No Filter offers an engaging account of how tech founders' ideals inevitably have to be squared with making profits.

A fascinating business story - but also much more than that . . . Frier is a skilled reporter and an astute and sensitive cultural observer. No Filter is a vital read for anyone seeking to understand the incredible power Silicon Valley executives exercise over us, and the opaque, unpredictable and undemocratic mechanisms by which they do so.

A vivid portrait of clashing Silicon Valley egos

Officially, this is the tale of the photo-sharing app Instagram, but it's also a wider story of Silicon Valley - the fragile egos, the feuds, the deals done around fire pits . . . Mark Zuckerberg is the book's sometimes cartoonish villain, ending staff meeting with the cry: "Domination!"

No Filter is a topical and well-reported account of the rise of Instagram and its takeover by Facebook. But it also tackles two vital issues of our age: how Big Tech treats smaller rivals and how social media companies are shaping the lives of a new generation.

Bloomberg reporter Sarah Frier chronicles the rise of photo-sharing social network Instagram, from when it was still a location-based app named "Burbn" to the ad-driven juggernaut it is today . . . Frier deftly streamlines from multiple interviews with some of the most high-profile executives, venture capitalists, and most-followed celebrities on Instagram

Congressional documents may have told us why Mark Zuckerberg thought he needed to buy Instagram, but No Filter is the inside story of the company that Facebook actually bought. Sarah Frier's book is the definitive account that bridges the gaps between the company Instagram was born as, the company that eventually sold to Facebook for $1 billion, and the company we know today. The intrigue of this origin story will only grow as the status of Instagram - as a brand within Facebook and a player in our daily lives - is sure to change in the decade ahead.

Utterly brilliant . . . It is so fascinating because it works at two levels: there's the personal story of these two founders making it up as they go along . . . and then there's the bigger story of Silicon Valley itself, and the unstoppable pressure to grow and go viral . . . [Frier] explores how Instagram changed society in terms of influencers, and also in terms of what it does to us, when we see these heavily filtered images of perfection in other people's lives - and this is really worth thinking about.

Examines the all-pervasive impact of Instagram and what it says about today's society.