When design shouldn’t be simple

Once I did a talk about the parallels between design and music. I took my guitar and played a little piece of this beautiful Bach prelude to show that music is like a sequence of raising tension and releasing cadence. And then I asked the audience to think of that as the user flow, which is also a sequence that leads to some goal: the happy end, the cadence.

That parallel pushed me to this unorthodox thought:

If you need some tension to feel the cadence, what if you need to challenge your users, so they could feel the accomplishment?

But to answer that question we need to understand the concept of challenge in design, as well as its dichotomy — design simplicity.

Hegelian unity of opposites in nature, statistics, literature, design

Deconstructing simplicity first

When you hear “keep it simple” what does it mean? Sometimes it means “remove the clutter” or “give only needed information to perform the task”. But when you see two different mockups, it’s so hard to measure which one is simpler.

Take one of the most popular UX metrics — the SUS Metric. Its originator, Jeff Sauro, aimed to measure usability by measuring the perceived ease of use (Sauro, 2013). The same goes with Jakob Nielsen, who defined usability also as “a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use” (Nielsen, 2012). Ok, so ease of use is the root.

But what is ease of use?

Steve Krug would argue that the answer was around “satisfying user’s wants and needs as quickly and seamlessly as possible” (Krug, 2000). The fact that fewer people remember this phrase than those who worship his pithy, ‘don’t make me think,’ actually proves in itself that simplification works.

That motto later evolved into the concept of Frictionless design, where frictions are “interactions that inhibit people from intuitively and painlessly achieving their goals within a digital interface” (Young, 2015).

So, we could say it’s easy to use your design if the user puts a minimum of the cognitive load into performing the task. Another way to say this would be with the word “intuitive”.

Intuitive design

If you are a fan of easy-to-read Daniel Kahneman’s concept of “Thinking Fast & Slow” (Kahneman, 2013), or just know a bit about the human mind, you might know that our lazy brain loves to rely on subconsciousness instead of being fully engaged and attentive. That means calling a design intuitive is to say that it requires minimal conscious thought. Is it echoing Krug’s motto to you too?

Sounds like m̶a̶n̶i̶p̶u̶l̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ magic — by intuitive and easy-to-use design you make the user do what they want to in the fastest and easiest way. Wait a minute. Is it always “what they want to”?

So let’s walk through the cases when your design shouldn’t be that simple.

When frictionless is bad: too much engagement

Remember when you last time lost a few hours by scrolling the feed. Was it easy? It didn’t require any effort from you. Same for kids. 7.5 hours — the average time of daily screen use by teens, not including for school or homework (Common Sense, 2019).

Daily screen use by kids and teens (Common Sense, 2019)

Shopping is another area designers go to great lengths making easy and intuitive. It’s so fast to make a new purchase in a few minutes after seeing the thing for the first time. What are the results:

• 30 million taps on Instagram shopping posts every month (Instagram, 2019)
• 55% of fashion shoppers have made a purchase based on an Instagram creator’s post (Creators, 2020)

When designers minimise conscious thought before user action, they can make people:

• watch stuff they don’t want to;
• buy things they don’t need to;
• expect to get things too easily.

Don’t we create another brick in the (consumption) wall by rising up our engagement metrics?

When the user is not engaged enough

Another side of minimising cognitive efforts is when the user is not engaged enough and doesn’t make conscious decisions when needed. We do that by:

• Making the removal button just like any other button and placing it in a regular place;
• Not using the confirmation dialogues;
• Using the same component for inconsistent purposes;
• Not adding the “Undo” button.

The more users are familiar with the product and do things automatically, the more slip-type mistakes they made (NNg, 2015).

Previously mentioned Daniel Kahneman suggests using cognitive “speed bumps” as an effective way of ensuring users fully engage with a problem (Kahneman, 2013). For designers that mean require additional engagement to avoid unintentional mistakes: confirmation dialogues, warnings. It could be also scaled to encourage more consciousness for bigger decisions:

• how might we educate users to do the fact-checks before easily hit the “Share” button?
• how might we encourage users to actually think before accepting using all their data for marketing and ads?
• how might we ensure the user doesn’t reveal any personal data to unreliable services?

Confirmation dialogue in “easy” and “hard” modes

When you want to educate your user

The intuitive design might not be good for building skills. Sometimes, simple design can increase the number of mistakes and make education not effective enough. In 2005 Frederick Shane, PhD in Decision Sciences, asked university students to pass a test. Half of the students got a test printed in a small, washed-out font, another one got a test in a big and perfectly readable font. 90% of the students who completed the test in the normal font made a mistake, compared to only 35% of those who were given the less legible version. (Shane, 2005)

How could the CRT test cards look like

How does this apply to design?

• Don’t hope that a 3-step onboarding tour will turn the newbie user into a fully operational expert — it will just make the newbie user confident in their skills. Try to educate users in real context instead.
• Greater results require greater effort, don’t be afraid to challenge your user when needed. This actually might not scare users away, but give them joy.

When you want to give a sense of achievement

Speaking of joy, I believe you know that feeling when you are so interested and involved in the process that the whole world stops existing. We usually call it full concentration or immersion. This is happening because you have the challenge and enough skills to take it.

Here is a challenge for you. Read the last name of the guy who called this state a flow — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He proved that this happens on the basis of the challenge level and the skills level that are balanced against each other (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008).

Where the state of flow begins

Would the user experience you are designing be engaging and enjoyable if it didn’t require any skills or effort? Game designers — creators of level-based experience — know the answer for sure.

The trap of “Don’t make me think”

So why are we talking about this? What are the consequences of not making users think?

First off check the Dark Patterns Hall of Shame to see how designers rely on users subconsciousness so they can get profitable action for the business.

You may also check this brilliant research by Sarah Cupples on how frictionless design cause online discrimination and racism.

Want something more challenging? Here is a book “Evil by Design” by Chris Nodder about how designers fall into seven deadly sins by making users feel good about doing what the business needs.

We don’t argue about complicating, but strive to be more critical to the rules of thumb and understand design decisions' short and long-term effects.

The designers are the creators of the new online reality. If we don’t make users think and don’t teach them to put any effort to reach the goal, what society do we create?

Resources

1. Suro, Jeff (2013). 10 Things to Know About the System Usability Scale (SUS). MeasuringU. https://measuringu.com/10-things-sus/
2. Nielsen, Jacob (2012). Usability 101: Introduction to Usability. NNGroup. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-101-introduction-to-usability/
3. Krug, Steve (2000). Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach To Web Usability. 3rd ed. New Riders.
4. Young, Victoria (2015). “Strategic UX: The Art Of Reducing Friction”. Telepathy. https://www.dtelepathy.com/blog/business/strategic-ux-the-art-of-reducing-friction.
5. Kaneham, Daniel (2013). Thinking Fast And Slow. 1st ed. Penguin.
6. Rideout, V., and Robb, M. B. (2019). The Common Sense census: Media use by tweens and teens, 2019. San Francisco, CA: Common Sense Media. https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/uploads/research/2019-census-8-to-18-key-findings-updated.pdf
7. Laubheimer, Page (2015). Preventing User Errors: Avoiding Unconscious Slips. NNGroup. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/slips/
8. Shane, Frederick (2005). Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making, Journal of Economic Perspectives. V. 19, N. 4. https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/089533005775196732
9. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (2008). Finding flow: the psychology of engagement with everyday life. New York, NY: Basic Books.
10. Cupples, Sarah (2021). Frictionless design, frictionless racism https://uxdesign.cc/frictionless-racism-1097022d07f8
11. Nodder, Chris (2013). Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us into Temptation. Wiley.
12. Yuan, Jason (2019). The fallacy of Easy https://uxdesign.cc/the-fallacy-of-easy-a89ef864759b
13. Galante, Vincent, Design & Dialectic, OCAD University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada (2018). http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/2300/1/Galante_Vincent_2018_MDes_SFI_MRP.pdf