Be Human
This is a piece from the 10 guidelines for Kickass World Class website making.
This is a tricky one, i confess. Writing about human behaviour is hard enough to freak the shit out of me. Especially when we consider these expectations as something variable, according to the each user’s perspective, there is no way for me to be sure about anything (and i love it).
There are many ways to make your interfaces a lil’ bit more interesting, thus, the overall user experience more pleasant. I cannot come out here and list them as if they were some sort of rules, mostly because i don’t even know all possible ways to enhance UI to the most natural and intuitive way.
What i do know, however, is the fact that i’m an emotional being — we all are — and i love when websites get a reaction out of me.
How human are brands willing to be in order to get there?
How many times did you feel a brand was actually having a conversation with you? We all know not many of them fully embrace this behaviour. Yet we hear them talking about engagement and how cool they want to become.
But let me tell you something, having a drug dealer attitude does not mean you are talking with your customers. Just because you’re constantly asking “do you want drugs?” doesn’t turn out to be a conversation.
Keep in mind i’m not here to write about any kind of marketing strategy. I’m rather interested in writing about details that make your interface more human so, Mr. salesman, a silly button or a promo sticker doesn’t make it more engaging. Sometimes a call-to-action is just a call-to-action.
Anyway… some brands are reasonable enough to be aware of their lack of human connection. I like those companies. Even though they have good intentions, most of the time we get a twisted, complex and unrealistic brief. Then we have to make sense out of it and find the real needs. Not the same as newspapers or magazines, where we have different expectations. We are talking about digital platforms here. Our attention span is considerably low. With websites that story is different, users don’t process all that amount of information so, stop treating them like robots. Be reasonable. If you are a machine (bot), don’t act like a human. If you are human designing for humans, try not to be a machine. Be human.
Well, how can we think of a more human interface?
Assuming you guys already know the main goals and primary tasks involved with the project, it is fair to say you are able to focus on specific elements, behaviours, interactions, feedbacks, etc. So, PRIORITY comes out as a crucial factor here. You are now able to take a lot of crap and noise out of sight. You don’t need to go minimal but users don’t need to know everything about the brand above the fold either — that is just pure nonsense — despite the number of articles you might have read “proving” the opposite.
Don’t believe me? Try to approach a person out of blue and say everything about yourself in the first 15 seconds. Everything. I bet you will become a creep right-away, that person will be gone before you know it.
Take Uber’s reDesign as an example. This homepage could’ve had included every single bullet point about the company’s added value, new industry sectors, new investors and all that boring crap people don’t care about. Instead they focus on the single message that needed to be taken into account. “We’ve turned into something bigger. Check our new look.”
The layout is clean enough but not minimal, the visual hierarchy works in message’s favour with 1 rotating headline, 1 obvious CTA and 1 mood video.
Once you go with a cleaner layout you will be able to break all the important information into steps, give away some of it now and let the user find the rest at the right moment. So you let them discover more content and let them feel in control of the experience.
DISCOVERABILITY is the keyword here. Sometimes this is what brands/clients are looking for when they say “game mechanics”. They don’t know how to express themselves in the right way and we shouldn’t judge them. Right? But there’s a thing.
You can only discover what you cannot see.
That’s why showing every bit of information right away is not always the best option.
This amazing project from 84.Paris is one of the best website experiences i’ve ever had in my life. It has everything a designer wishes for a project. But i’m gonna focus on discoverability here. The fact that Recollection uses the space bar to load and start your small bites of experience, allows the navigation to be almost UI free. The user doesn’t need to focus on a specific element, doesn’t get lost, doesn’t get spammed with unnecessary info because all he/she has to do is to press the biggest button on the keyboard. As a goal, we have to discover hidden gems to trigger the music play so we can have fun. The result: Site of the year.
Once you have these steps tackled you will see your website way more inline with natural human behaviours. It will allow you to take your experience to a higher level, a level where your experience is not just visual — brought by a flat screen — you can now bring other senses to the table. You can include sound, voice control, touch, predictable steps and lot of techniques i don’t know (yet) to make your piece more human.
Eleks brought a fresh approach with video and sound for Google Glass experiment. The whole experience is a linear story where the user doesn’t have much power over but… triggering the events with voice control is definitely amazing, specially when we consider the product they are promoting. It feels like you are actually trying Google Glass.
With this approach, you will end up having users more connected to your brand because you treat them as humans and not machines/numbers.
In my opinion, engagement starts here and when you are talking about world-class website making, that is something you don’t want to give up on.
(read the other posts on 10 guidelines for Kickass World Class website making)
