Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
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
Full Episode
I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.
And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director. You might know me from The League, Veep, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.
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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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