How To Design Intuitive Interfaces
“People ignore design that ignores people.” — Frank Chimero, The Shape of Design
Unintuitively, designing an intuitive interface begins with the user not the interface. Rather than starting with a cool transition or sick animation, the best designers start by creating personas, empathy maps and use cases for their user groups. Why?
Because until they have a very good idea of who they’re designing for, and how those people will use their application, they can’t make informed decisions about the IA, UI and IxD.
Personas
By gathering enough information about a user group to understand similarities and divergences in how they use a product, we can create user personas. A persona (unlike a person) is an aggregate of user actions and goals. It’s tied directly to how people use an application or website, and informs the design and user flows.
As an example, an internal dashboard that’s used by agents to keep track of customer accounts may also be used by managers to keep track of agents and their productivity. The manager and the agent are separate personas; they need their own view and flow through the application.
A good designer will take that into account when figuring out what the information architecture and layout will look like.
Where did these actions and goals come from? Usually from user research and usability testing.
Once a designer understands the personas for an application, he’s able to create an intuitive flow and interface that accomodates all users’ needs, or at least the majority of those needs with (hopefully) workarounds for the edge cases.
Here are some cool tools for making your persona:
Empathy mapping
Learn how your users feel about your application with empathy mapping. Empathy mapping and the user’s journey through the application uncovers biases, frustrations, pain points and moments of delight which you can then leverage to improve your customer’s experience.
Want to make a user journey and empathy map? It’s easy:
1. Watch your user from the moment they open the application.
2. Write down everything they say.
3. Ask them how they’re feeling as they’re working their way through the task.
- Thoughts — Keep track of what the user is thinking: “How long is this going to take?” and “I hope I don’t have to make an account first.”
- Feelings — Keep track of the user’s emotional state: “Starting to get frustrated that it takes so long to download.”
- Actions — Keep track of the user’s behavior: “Bailed when the spinner spun for longer than 15 seconds.”
Rate their emotions on a scale of 1–3 from happy to frustrated. Ask them to describe how they’re feeling at each activity point. (e.g. “You’re onboarding now, how do you like making an account?” “This is really frustrating, it’s hard to type in a long, complicated password — twice — while I’m on my mobile phone.”)
Once you’ve mapped their whole way through the task, you’ve got an empathy map. Now do it again with at least 5 other users and notice any patterns.
If you’re feeling designery, you can put it into a graph and show it to your product team. Otherwise, simply use it to ensure you’re fixing the pain points and designing for delight.
“Product strategy is about solving problems, and empathy maps shed light on which problems to solve, and how.” — Studio UXPin
Use cases
Sometimes user’s have different goals when using your applications–and sometimes those goals are in conflict with your business. For instance, a customer trying to find a movie time on their mobile phone while standing outside the theater is often frustrated by ads that slow down or derail their task. (Not that it’s ever happened to me, I’m mentioning it for a friend.)
Identifying use cases, means identifying goals, tasks and the environment or situation during which a user will be trying to complete the task and accomplish the goals. When you know that one use case for your app is while outside a movie theater, in strong sunlight, trying to find the movie times with the social pressure of a line of people behind, you will identify different pain points from those of a user sitting at home deciding which movie to see.
Think about:
- where your customers are using your app
- when they’re using it
- why they’re using it
Write use case stories to explain each of those instances in some detail. Then go do a little usability testing based on those use cases. Or — if you’re brave and have a theater background — do a little bodystorming with your team to uncover pain points.
Business goals vs user goals
Friction points between users’ goals and business’ goals is also a common pain point use cases will uncover. Businesses want to make money. Users want to accomplish their task (e.g. to find a movie to watch tonight). When businesses ignore the users’ goals and focus entirely on their own goal — to show as many ads as possible, for instance — users get frustrated and click away. Likely never to return.
On the other hand, a business must earn revenue to stay in business. They can’t prioritize the user entirely, of they are never profitable.
The golden spot is the point in the Venn diagram where business goals and user goals overlap. Find that sweet spot and you’ve got a viable design that will make users happy and stakeholders happy too.
