Simplify Your Product With Time Savings
I’ve talked about Law 1: Reduce (Simplify Your Product with Brute-Force Methods), and Law 2: Organise (Simplify Your Product With Gestalt Theory) of Laws of Simplicity. Law 3 is about Time: Savings in time feel like simplicity. John Maeda uses ‘feel’, because time can be perceived shorter that it actually is. Simple example would be when I was queueing at a restaurant. The wait time felt shorter when I had a chat with my wife, or when I watched some NBA clips or football clips on Youtube. It’s not just about making the wait time shorter, it’s also about making the wait time more tolerable. Everyone wants everything to be done or served now. The expectation is higher than ever. They want it now. The challenge is: how do we make the time shorter, or perceived to be shorter? There are several things:
1. Removing steps, or constraints.
Carefully removing steps. This includes removing too many choices, and help users by giving them the best choices. Let them choose, but keep the choices to minimum.
2. Show a clear progress when the users are waiting for something to complete.
See below two interactions I created in Principle. Which one do you think is faster in download time?
If you’re like most of the people, you’d say Version 2 is faster. The reality is, both take 4 seconds to complete. Version 2 is perceived to be faster, or shorter in wait time, because of the progressive interaction.
There was an experiment done by Apple about the impact of a progress bar. Users would perceive the system/computer completed a task in less time than when there’s no progress bar shown at all.
3. Give something extra as an exchange to make the wait time more tolerable.
Once I made an order from Domino’s Pizza, they couldn’t deliver in 30 minutes as they promised, then they gave me a free pizza. It made the wait time more tolerable.
When you make the wait time shorter or perceived to be shorter, users feel they have saved time — and the experience feels simpler. In the world that’s getting more and more complex, simplicity is so appealing to the users, they don’t mind spending money for it (like buying a simple iPod Shuffle that plays random song from your music library). Don’t wait to apply these three laws to your product. The users want something simple now.
