Do Make Me Think — The Case for Confrontational Design
By Nick Lukes
If I asked you what good design should be, what would you say?
Simple, perhaps? Elegant? Easy to use? Intuitive? These are all great things, and you’d struggle to find a design briefing where at least one of these ideas didn’t appear as a guiding ambition. As functionalist design legend Dieter Rams set out in the fourth of his canonical 10 Principles of Good Design:
Good Design is Unobtrusive.
Steve Krug put it more plainly in the title of his UX design bible, “Don’t make me think.” And why should we? After all, most designed artefacts we interact with are there to help us accomplish a bigger goal. An interface that constantly demands attention frustrates us from achieving what we really want to do, and could even be dangerous. No-one wants to have to think about how to switch on a kettle, or to use their car’s brakes.
So obvious are the successes of this make-it-easy philosophy (and we could draw a direct line from these principles to the incredible commercial success of Apple’s iPhone, among others), that we can easily forget about other tools in the designer’s kit. Is the demand for simplicity enough to call it “case closed”, and conclude that all design should be forever slick and effortless? That every interface and convenience should carry us to our destination without thought or hindrance? Not necessarily, as the following examples will demonstrate.
White Pixel Fences
In 2016 community-based social network Nextdoor, which “connects neighbours to each other — and to everything nearby” was grappling with a racial profiling problem. Nextdoor allowed neighbours to share tips on activity they thought was suspicious, and escalate these directly to police departments if they wanted.
However Nextdoor’s app had come to be described as a “home for racial profiling”, with multiple user reports and news stories highlighting posts making racist claims about non-white community members, with minimal evidence of wrongdoing.
Nextdoor decided to take action, and introduced a number of new challenges to anyone making a post in the Crime and Security section. Users would have to submit a detailed form justifying their allegation, and while doing so would see educational guidance explaining the risks of racial profiling, and what constitutes a reasonable suspicion.
By introducing this level of “design friction”, along with tools to screen for racial language, Nextdoor were able to reduce egregiously racialised posts by 75% . Interrupting users’ “intuitive” reactions, and challenging them to detail their thinking explicitly before posting, helped to reduce instances of thoughtless racial prejudice. The interface changes may have made it slower and more difficult to post a concern, but by doing so the number of harmful posts reduced and any valid remaining concerns would benefit from having more detailed information attached to them. As more companies are driven to consider their responsibilities to broader society, equity as well as individual user convenience may become an increasingly important design consideration.
Nextdoor’s efforts against racial profiling continue, and in June this year they removed the option to send posts to the police.
What does this big button do, exactly?
In the summer of 2020, a 20-year-old student named Alex Kearns was one of many who’d been using the millennial-oriented zero-commission investments and trading app Robinhood. The app aims to “democratise finance” with its fee-free structure and simple, gamified interface. It has slick graphs, big friendly buttons to place orders, and showers of onscreen confetti to welcome novice investors.
On June 12th 2020, Alex took his own life. Details released by the family including a screenshot from Alex’s phone reveal that the interface was showing “a negative $730,165 cash balance displayed in red.” In a note left on his computer that morning Alex asked, “How was a 20 year old with no income able to get assigned almost a million dollars worth of leverage?”
While it is impossible to know all the factors that led to this tragic event, it has been suggested that Alex’s despair may have been driven by misunderstanding, and crucially a lack of information shown in the app’s interface about the complex multi-stage financial instrument Alex had invested in. According to Forbes, the negative figure “may not have represented uncollateralised indebtedness at all, but rather his temporary balance until the stocks underlying his assigned options actually settled into his account.”
Robinhood’s founders have responded with changes to the app , and “is now pledging to add new criteria and educational resources for customers seeking to buy and sell options, in order to ensure they more fully understand the speculative nature of the trades.”
Nevertheless, the ease with which digital platforms can allow inexperienced users to use powerful tools they might not fully understand raises important questions about about when a user’s best interest is served by not only facilitating, but also restricting, their actions.
We’ve seen two examples where adding design friction could help steer users into better decision-making. Could design challenges also be used to make experiences more emotionally rewarding?
style:{marmite}.css
Think of modern web design, and what do you see? Rounded buttons, friendly vector icons, and tasteful pastel tones? Digital Brutalism is a web design style that’s developed in opposition to the welcoming overtures of the startup aesthetic. As described by Aaron Ganci and Bruno Ribeiro in the University of Michigan’s Dialectic Journal:
Brutalist websites are designed to engage the viewer in a hostile way. They frequently utilise the rough aesthetics of the early web, circa 1994–98, in raw and dissonant ways. Their formal configurations and facilitation of interactive functions break nearly every commonly held modern design convention, which forces the viewer to be fully present during his / her engagement with one of these websites in order to comprehend their content.
The style has become popular on contemporary fashion, arts and media sites over the last decade as designers have sought to differentiate themselves from what they see as lazy, insincere and overly transactional Bootstrap-templated sites. While these hard-edged and confrontational layouts may repel some visitors, those willing to stick with it will find themselves focusing more deeply to digest the content, ideally developing a deeper connection to it as a result.
Not your mum’s net
What brutalism does for web aesthetics — self-selecting for a more sharply defined group of highly engaged visitors, Snapchat could be seen doing with UX design. When it launched the app seemed deceptively simple, opening directly into a camera viewer to instantly share snaps with friends. However Snapchat flamboyantly broke many iOS interface conventions, introducing a range of new swipes and gestures with no instructional hints telling you what to do. For users only passing by, Snapchat’s interface could be confusing. As Sean McGowan of UsabilityGeek put it:
Snapchat rewrote the design book, but not in a different language — they made a code. Their obscure UX acts as a cipher that teens were willing to spend time cracking to fit in with their peers, and keep up with what is cool.
For most companies this might seem like bad business — surely such a radical design philosophy, that risks turning some users away, could hurt your overall user growth? However for an app pitching to become teens’ favourite place to hang out, there was a clear benefit — keeping out your vibe-killing parents. This wasn’t just a happy accident, as founder and CEO Evan Speigel revealed at a conference in 2016, “This is by design. We’ve made it very hard for parents to embarrass their children.”
But why male models? (Conclusion)
We have to acknowledge that most of the time a slick, effortless, and predictable UX will be the appropriate solution.
However, as designers we must always challenge our assumptions, and truly investigate the real design needs and objectives for a given problem. Sometimes, just sometimes, there might be a good reason to make things harder. To confront your users’ expectations, challenge their knowledge and beliefs, and expect them to work harder when they engage with your service. Designing with intentional friction, you may turn away some casual visitors, but if the design responds to real needs you could be rewarded with deeper and more constructive relationships with your users.
Nick Lukes — Designer at Market Gravity, Deloitte Digital
Disclaimer: Deloitte UK Design Blog is an independent publication and has not been authorised, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. iPhone is a registered trademark of Apple Inc.
