The UX Uncanny Valley
When users don’t have options, things can get weird
As designers, some of our goals in analyzing the user experience needs of our apps, websites, and software is to streamline the product, find places to make the process easier for users, and guide users to complete their task with minimal hesitation.
But is there a UX tipping point where we’ve created an experience that is too easy? A UX “uncanny valley”?
If you’re unfamiliar with the uncanny valley, a Wikipedia article notes that “the concept of the uncanny valley suggests humanoid objects which appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings elicit uncanny, or strangely familiar, feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers.”
I joked on Twitter that the final destination of UX is to put the “next” button immediately under the cursor as soon as a user does an action. How giddy would something like this make our clients:
When Microsoft first introduced its search engine, Bing, to rival that of Google, this was one of their commercials:
