Cognitive Fatigue that’s good for UX: Part 2
I’m Nick Hunt-Davis; a design and product development specialist. I’m writing down some of the things I think and say about brains and machines and how to make them best buddies.
Habit Forming design patterns.
Let’s say we’re designing a simple app to make bank payments overseas.
I’m going to focus on the “paying a foreign account” task.
In order to send some money back home to Mum, our users need to tell the app a few things about the transaction.
1. Details about the person they’re paying. (Name, contact info etc.)
2. Where the payment recipient is in the world. (Country)
3. The account our user is paying from.
4. How much money they’re sending Mum.
This is as brief a process as forex regulation will permit. We must have all of this information every time our user make a payment.
Let’s pretend that this is a tool we’re expecting our users to use very regularly. Maybe your user is a fancy Hollywood kid, and any fewer than 5 transactions a day will break Mum’s heart.
So we want to make the payment process as quick and easy as possible. We want it to be habitual, we want it to become second nature, automatic. Then it will feel easy, effortless and second-nature.
The more similar each page is in design and approach, the easier. Your brain is only learning one pattern, and the habit learned for one page is reinforced by all the others.
This decreases our users cognitive fatigue. Remember, those user’s brains only have so many “f*cks to give” per day! Ideally they should only have to give us some at first, and fewer on each successive use.
If the use of your app requires user’s brains to dish out f*cks like Caligula, they’ll likely go the same way he did. Madness! (not syphilis, there isn’t an app for that yet).
Through a consistent design pattern we can begin to turn the manual effort of inputting all of that info into an automatic one.
Screen 1: A form for Recipient details > Next button
Screen 2: A form for Payment location details > Next button
Screen 3: A form for Account details > Next button
Screen 4: A form for How much money is being sent > Next button
Screen 5: Information from pages 1 to 4 > Confirm
Before long, it becomes a breeze to add info. And if in the future we need to add a new flow, we can use the same pattern to maintain a familiar and intuitive experience.
Pros and cons work well for interaction design choices. It’s an easy and massively valuable little metric to identify what works and what doesn’t.
Pros?
Easy, this is all the same thing over and over again. Users brains will figure out how to automate this process in no time at all. Low f*cks to output ratio.
Cons?
Potentially, a BIGGY!
That final screen at the end there, the information confirmation screen?It’s asking our user to confirm that all the information they’ve given so far, including the amount they’re paying is accurate. It’s uber important, ’cause once you hit “Confirm” That’s it! it’s done! As it stands, it’s just asking for trouble.
Why?
Your clever habit forming design could really hurt your user.
It would become very easy for a user to take the wrong action without a second thought. The very thing we did to make things easier could spell disaster. The user will slip into the form-filling groove you so carefully crafted, and in keeping with the pattern you’ve taught them — hit “Confirm” without truly having a look at the confirmation screen! (Ever scrolled to the bottom and hit “accept” without looking?)
“Um… Hi there, Landlord Scrooge McTrump… earlier when I paid you ALL OF MY MONEY, that was a mistake… I accidentally hit confirm without actually checking. I have no idea how that happened?! Please give me back my money?”
This is an occasion where we actually want our user’s brain to spend a few f*cks.
How do we fix it?
Intentional Cognitive Load
We need to break the very cycle we worked so hard to automate. We need to increase cognitive load for just a moment.
How? Visually variable Confirmation Screens.
Screen 1: White screen, blue button
Screen 2: White screen, blue button
Screen 3: White screen, blue button
Screen 4: White screen, blue button
Screen 5: PURPLE SCREEN, WHITE BUTTON!
Alert! Pay attention! Make your user take notice.
Breaking the otherwise consistent UX pattern will draw the users attention to this important screen. Sometimes we want to create a little cognitive fatigue.
Consider which actions should be automatic (Most of them), and those that should remain manual (When users need to sit up and take note).
What if our user is using this tool countless times a day, every day! Couldn’t the purple screen, white button pattern become automatic too?
We apply the same thinking as before to solve this.
What worked about the purple and white before?
It broke the pattern.
If users start automating the final Purple confirmation screens, break that pattern too!
- We could use confirmation screens that are randomly visually different.
Sometime it’s purple, sometime blue, or green, or fuchsia? - We could move the confirmation button around. Instead of resting in it’s familiar place at the bottom, now it’s up top!
There are a number of annoying patterns we could use if we consider breaking the habitual and automatic patterns you’ve created or foresee.
If a taking notice of a part of your design is really really important, if your user should seriously pay close attention. You’ve always got additional dialogues for “Are you sure?” “No seriously, take a good look at what you’re approving here, are you really sure?” These too serve to break the automatic pattern.
Taking it to the laval!
Using a handy little touch of AI, we could go one step further and warn users about suspicious confirmations. If we know that John typically pays Sarah $100 near the end of each month, and he get’s the the confirmation screen after accidentally putting in $1000 — wouldn’t it be swell if we highlighted that bit we suspect to be wrong?
Hey dude! That’s one too many zeroes I think? Don’t you mean $100?
“yes I do “
In conclusion
Know when to make things automatic, through familiar design patterns and consistency, and consider when it makes sense to make actions manual.
Sometimes we need our users’ brains to work a little harder.
After all, it’s often for their own good.
