Daily UX Challenge #6 — Worst Phone Number Input
This is a part of #DailyUX design challenge series. I write about my thought process of approaching 20 different design prompts.
Design Prompt
Today, the challenge is based on the blog post “If Satan was a web designer…”. Get inspired by those unusable inputs and create the worst phone number input you could imagine for a user.
How to be Evil When I’m Not
Since day one I started my career as an experience designer almost a decade ago, I’ve always thrived on making things easy and delightful to use for people. Now, this prompt is asking me to create some chaos to make inputting a phone number unpleasant or even unusable. So the real question is — how to be evil when I’m not?
One rule of thumb for good user experience is things work the way people expect them to be, in other words, “Don’t Make Me Think”, as in the famous book on usability by Steve Krug. So to make things not work, my strategy is to come up with ideas to go against anything that aids inputting a phone number.
Everything Goes the Opposite Way
No input structure as an affordance
Good form fields use the input structure as an affordance to indicate the required format for the expected value. It’s particularly helpful for fields with defined character count such as phone numbers. My strategy is not to provide that.
Anti-norm
Almost everyone type phone numbers from left to right. Again, my strategy is not let people do that.
Barriers to complete task
Inputting the phone number is the primary task. My strategy is to create extra tasks as barriers, so people need to finish those tasks first to be able to get to the core task. Using the form of a familiar game (e.g., Tetris) is my redemption of feeling guilty to make a simple job complicated for people.
Final Design
The final design after all my evilness maxed out:
What I learned
It didn’t take me too long to come up with “evil” ideas to make a simple task complicated. That’s why making things simple is not easy. I’m not the most badass experience designer out there, but if I were able to make one thing simpler than before for people through my design, I should pat myself in the back and remind myself that I just made some positive impact in this world!
Previous pieces in the series (so far)
Challenge #1 — Wallet
Challenge #2 — Landing page
Challenge #3 — Parking machine
Challenge #4 — Chatbot onboarding flow
Challenge #5 — Teacup
