“Whoa! How did you do that?”
Thoughts on efficiency in user experience
User experience started to coalesce into a formal field around the same time the astounding casualties of World War I and II necessitated battlefield technologies that fresh troops could rapidly learn and effectively use. UX grew as an answer to a fundamentally “engineeringy” question: efficiency. How do you engineer tools, weapons, and technologies that millions of people can master quickly, effectively, and with as few resources as possible?
For better or worse, that fundamental engineering question endures at the heart of user experience. Just look at the very first paragraph of the (rather poor) Wikipedia article on User Experience:
The first requirement for a great user experience is to meet the exact needs for the usage of a product or a service, without fuss or bother. To achieve this, users must have all necessary information for their task without being overloaded, not having unnecessary actions, calculation or having to recall. Interaction techniques must be familiar and behave along expectation, errors must be prevented. If users make errors, there must be easy way to recover them. When usage is frequent, product or service must provide shortcut. Users need to have feedback, feel in control and know what is going on at all time.
Every facet of that paragraph relates to efficiency. More output for less input. Less fuss and bother, more productivity.
There’s no problem with the efficiency question in and of itself. It’s an important question, and it’s one that should be carefully considered for any user experience.
But should it be the heart of User Experience? Should it be the definition of user experience? With a purely academic engineer’s mindset, the answer is, “Sure! Why not?.” My inner textbook computer scientist screams, “Yes! Of course!”
But from the perspective of human behavior, the answer to that question isn’t quite as clear. If the heart of user experience is efficiency, then efficiency, which is a numeric entity, must be the ultimate measure of a good user experience. But, a measure, doesn’t quite capture the breadth and depth of experience. We can all agree there are immeasurable qualities to experience. These qualities can’t be easily reduced to an Output/Input formula.
What’s more, when it comes to experiences in our lives, we sometimes prefer the inefficient over the ultra-efficient and super-optimized. We even go so far as to pay premiums for the inefficient over the efficient. Most of us don’t subsist on liquid meal replacements, despite the tremendously efficient eating experiences they give us. Instead we have the audacity to go out to slow, candle-lit dinners, with a live pianist. We literally pay extra money for slower, more relaxed service. We spend more time, energy, and sometimes money taking winding and scenic routes over straight line paths. And we still seem to come back to print books, even if to just inefficiently color, despite the advantages of electronic ones and zeroes. There are certain delightful experiences built into the inefficiencies of carrying one book that can’t be replicated with a full library on a Kindle or iPad. For example, happening on romantic partner at a cafe because you both happened to be reading the same physical copy of Crime and Punishment.
Take a minute and think about all the ways people around the world value seemingly inefficient experiences over more efficient ones. It doesn’t take long to question the wisdom of user experience design that has optimizing for efficiency at its definitional core. In fact, it may be that if efficiency is the central driver of your experience design, you could be missing opportunities to build great experiences for your users. If you’re in business, you’re potentially missing out on people’s seemingly counterintuitive willingness to pay premiums for inefficiencies, as long as those inefficiencies are in deference to unique and memorable experiences.
We spend a lot of time thinking about how to make experiences simpler, easier, and more efficient for users. But behavioral research and cultural wisdom both suggest that sometimes the more difficult path is more rewarding. Take for example the IKEA Effect, so-named by Dan Ariely: people who build their furniture like their furniture more than people who get it pre-assembled. They have a better experience, despite the less efficient experience of having to piece it together before getting to enjoy it.
So what if we change things up. What if instead of just looking at the efficiency question, we also asked more counterintuitive questions? What if we made the user experience more difficult, more inefficient, but designed it to be more rewarding experience for a human? It sounds like we’re turning UX on its head with such blasphemy, but this isn’t some brilliant lightbulb moment I’m sharing with you. This is archaic knowledge. For example, the entire game industry has known about this aspect of experience since as long as games have been around. A certain degree of challenge combined with rewards is something the human brain craves. Yet sometimes we forget context. We don’t design for humans and their brains or their contexts. We automatically design for formulas: output/input*100%. Over a hundred years after World War I and we still design user experiences as though our users are caught in the life and death struggle of war.
I recently encountered a neat if potentially unintentional example of the power of user experience in a human context. Two colleagues were using an iPad to do some document editing while traveling. At one point one of them used two fingers to control the text cursor, and the other, once it registered, exclaimed, “Whoa! How did you do that?!”
“Oh it’s easy…you just use two fingers on the keyboard like this…”
And in that moment you could see the glee on her face as he shared what up until that moment had been exclusive knowledge for her. She felt special sharing that exclusive knowledge. My other colleague meanwhile was delighted to have access to what seemed like an exclusive world. He felt special gaining that exclusive knowledge.
You could argue that hiding such a feature behind that gesture and giving no affordance to it is suboptimal. You could come up with dozens of designs to make it more obvious and get the affordance check. Designing to a word in a glossary is easy. But within a social and human context, the hiddenness of that feature rather strangely delivered a pleasant experience to those two people. Even by yourself there is a simple joy to discovering hidden corners of a product that you didn’t know before.
Crafting an experience for users is more than just making things efficient. Efficiency is a part of it, but my point is, don’t just rush to engineer efficient experiences. Craft for context. Sometimes it makes more sense to send your user down the longer, prettier road. And sometimes it doesn’t. Obviously, the user experience equivalent of a slow candle light dinner doesn’t make sense in the context of the Battle of Verdun. But how many of us are actually designing experiences for such an extreme context?
And no, this isn’t an excuse to be careless. There is a difference between a slow candle light dinner and bad service, and your customers and users will be able to identify that difference.
