More the screens better the exp?
As ux designers we are conditioned to believe, at least in the early years or forced to believe that less the number of screens the better the experience. However, in my experience and learning from my day to day engagement with applications, this belief doesn’t hold true.
However, It doesn’t mean its gospel and one goes adding many screens to a flow just to check this box.
We are experience designers. Our innate goal while crafting experiences is to craft one that is smooth and effective. So how is it that we solve it?
Let’s understand and examine the fundamental aspect of a screen. The goal of having a screen needs a purpose. Now we can broadly classify this into two major goals. One: to inform the user, two: to get information from the user.
Now in both events, one needs to do whats basic, so I will not venture into the conversation of basic usability in this piece.
Now to make sure that this goal is achieved, one needs to communicate the goal to the user.
Here comes the art of asking questions.
Consider an example, say you have 10 pieces of information that you need from the user. The most fundamental method is to populate a form with 10 input fields. Now, thats basic, but in actuality the fundamental idea of forms has not changed, the interactions might have. For example, a calendar event can now be configured using a date picker when appropriate, or adding more SKU units to your cart can be achieved by a counter rather than an open input. We understand that our forms aren’t redundant but have become more aware of there transactions, and now can be called smart.
Coming back to the main question with this learning guiding us. Allow me to ask you this, how does a screen with 10 different or similar input mechanisms manage the efficiency of the the user to read, process, or if the information asked isn’t available, then fetch that data from a hardware source and then input that into the designated input field.
That wasn’t just verbose and tiring to read, it’s the reality of every input you put on a screen. Now we have another question, how do we make sure that the user does not feel overwhelmed by the plethora of interactions you have planed the user to make.
Comprehension, cognition, intuition, affordances, correctness are just few avenues of consideration.
All these pile up the moment there is more than one question to be answered. And they pile up exponentially. With every question you add to a page, repeat these words in your mind from the start of the form. Thats the load this user will go through. Some users with a good digital expression would feel a little less overwhelmed, but it doesn’t go to say that all users have the same level of understanding and preference.
The solution, dividing the form. Now there are many ways to achieve this… you can categorize these inputs, you can choose to not show all question from the onset, you can provide a few more words to explain your ask, you can do a lot of treatment to make sure that this load is reduced. We will consider the option where the designer has decided to split the questions categorically and then among multiple screen(Bear with me).
Now with this decision, let’s see what have you achieved.
The user will now see one question on an entire page: what this does is, it warrants the users complete attention and focus to the thing in question. With nothing to distract, the efficiency of this user has rapidly increased, there by increasing the efficacy of the page. With this you have provided the user a single most important thing to think about. Might sound similar but to the user these are valuable. Your layout looks a bit better because its cleaner now. That increases the desirability of the page>form>module> product> company> brand. So with this little change in the way designers comprehend design, you’ve changed the world of the user. But wait, that means there would be 10 screens, won’t that mean that it will lead to a bitter experience. After-all youve added more screens. This happens to be a fallacy, that many people working in the makings of a product succumb to.
The idea is to attain a balance between the number of screens and the cognition each of them warrant.
You can ask the same question using smart means, using better components, reducing the effort by giving possible choices, reducing the amount of interactions without compromising the error reduction. Integrating forms smartly to fetch information sets from sources other than the user and having them confirmed. Questioning the purpose of the questions to know their actual value. And thereby reducing them with the same logic.
The true answer lies in, Where you need look. It is the fact that the load of a screen is directly in proportion to the amount of reading, processing, thinking, recalling, and understanding the ways to interact with the device required to complete given task. And not the fact that you eventually end up adding more screens. And that is how you can actually reduce the well known ‘cognitive load’ with proper efficacy. This way of thinking comes from a way of designing not screens but experiences.
Don’t just design screens my fellow designers, what you need do is find the value you add through experiences, and screens are mere means to achieve that.
