The Need for Critical Thinking in UX
It seems obvious, but it’s something that I don’t think designers do enough of — especially young designers, or designers early in their careers — when the focus of the work is about producing. Critical thinking is the most desirable trait of a designer of any kind, but particularly in the field of user experience.
A common preconception people outside of the design discipline have is that we’re simply making things look pretty, and it couldn’t be farther from the reality. Designers are intuitively making thousands of micro-decisions daily to produce or work within a design system and craft flows, for a wide variety of use-cases, for multiple types of users. In addition to our intuition, through research, testing, and validation we learn how justify these decisions.
But back to critical thinking. Let’s discuss a few statements we often hear in UX, and why they’re not always true.
Statement 1
Here’s a blanket statement we’ve heard several times before, “If it needs an instruction manual, it’s probably not a good user experience.” Well, what if it was a Boeing 747? Does that not need an instruction manual for the pilot?! Do they not need training!?
The argument in this case is that: “When things go wrong they should have the right information,” or “They should have that mission-critical information,” or “We should be able to reduce the training time or the load on the pilot.” All supplementary arguments to support the blanket statement: “If it needs an instruction manual, it’s not a good user experience.” We should all be careful of blanket statements, especially from “thought-leaders”, as they are often misleading. These statements are made with good intentions, to act as guiding principles for design, and most consumer products should in fact be able to rid of the user manual through great user experience design. But, of course a Boeing 747 needs a manual. The point here is that there are no hard and fast rules for what we do, it’s always conditional.
Statement 2
Another blanket statement we hear one I would say that I hear quite a bit is, “Without data, you’re just another opinion.” This is only partly true. What if the opinion is coming from, say, Steven Spielberg or J.J. Abrams while they’re reviewing a screenplay you’ve written, and they tell you, “It’s just not very good.” We can’t necessarily quantify what makes their opinion good or a more useful indicator than data, but they have billions of neurons in their brains and decades of experiences that sort of create what we could only call taste.
It might not be something that we can easy define in terms of someone’s opinion and qualify that or quantify that using data, but we know that certain people, based on their experience, really do have internalized data. They’ve got a lot of data points in their mind, it’s just not something we can see.
Statement 3
Lastly, one of the things that we heard was, “Wireframing is dead.” It was from another thought leader trying to make a statement, but even if you’re creating a very simple website and across the top-level navigation it has the options About Us, Services, Pricing, Testimonials, Contact, you are actually wireframing. You’re just doing it in your head, before you start to code or apply visual treatment.
But for argument’s sake, let’s imagine you are the Information Architect working with the Senior UI designer, and you’re creating a competitor to eBay or Amazon. In this case, to say that wireframing is dead would be really, really wrong. Nobody could actually keep that amount of information in their head. More importantly, it’d be almost impossible to communicate with the dozens of other people that would need to see those wireframes to understand how users move through the product and accomplish tasks.
With standards, conventions, and available UI kits, creating simple interfaces and applications is something that’s gotten easier to do, but when you deal with mission-critical, complex, or new user experiences, you really need to critically.
More Generalizations, Debunked
I’m going to give you a couple of other examples, not so much blanket statements, but generalizations. When you think critically about them and look at the counterpoint, you might realize it is not actually right.
One of the things that is well understood is “discoverability” as a metric, or the ability of the user to discover something.
In an app or other digital product, if it’s not easily discoverable, often we say, “Oh, it’s just not worth it to use.” But, in the case, for example, Apple’s “pinch and zoom” feature on the first iPhone, that was not highly discoverable. In fact, it was very non-obvious and required educating a generation of new users. It was a patented feature, and a cost/benefit analysis was done. Apple concluded that the cost of educating the user was worth it, because the benefit to being able to pinch and zoom to view regular websites on a mobile device was going to be an outstanding benefit. And it was.
Another desired goal is often reducing the number of button clicks to accomplish a task. It’s a metric designers and product people look at, and sometimes it makes sense. If you’re user is a server in a restaurant and they really use an point-of-sale app to enter a lot of information constantly, the number of button clicks might make sense.
But, at the same time, what about video games? A gamer might be pressing the buttons 3,600 times an hour, but there’s little work involved. Therefore, a better way to quantify the pain points of using a product is not to look at the number of buttons pressed, but the amount of work involved. For example, you could be just one button press away from having the answer or finishing the task, but if the question is a multiple choice question, and the question is “What’s the square root of 256,924.8?” There’s a lot of work involved to get to that one click.
In summary, always think critically about things. Take your time to understand the context of the user, and who the user is. Sometimes your users will be a captive audience and you will have the time to teach them a specific UI that may not be so obvious in the beginning but is very optimized for a very specific task. We see that in the medical space and the military space.
Don’t be afraid to question things, especially blanket statements, even if you hear them coming from someone you consider a “thought leader.” These sorts of statements are often just used to create an emotional response. Try to seek out counterpoints and debate them with your team.
Watch our original video that this article is based on.
Check out our other videos on all kinds of user experience concepts.
