Do-nothing see-nothing user interaction

Sometimes as a designer the most successful thing you could do is completely remove all user interaction.

It’s a paradox for a designer’s aim to be completely removing the thing they do, and I think it might happen far more often if people didn’t fear becoming obsolete.

The tech/engineering world has a vice - using the most obvious known user interaction pattern, however crappy. This usually manifests itself in everything visible being either red, amber, or green depending on some status which the user might probably doesn’t even care about.

“As a user, I want everything to be done for me, so I can get on with my life with minimal disruption”

Think of this user story whenever you’re designing something to see if there is anything, anything at all, you can stop asking users to do.

It’s down to us, as interaction designers, to stop the UI-by-default world we work in.

N.B. Learn from my mistake: Don’t spend 2 weeks researching whether you could completely remove a user interface, then present a blank piece of A2 paper to a project board as your design approach. It’s not as clever as you might have thought. Apparently.