This is how Netflix, Snapchat, and Microsoft break UX Design principles
User Experience principles and practices are essential to creating digital products that the user has a good time using. But sometimes breaking these UX Principles can be a good idea. In this article, we will go over some companies and look at how they purposefully break UX guidelines to achieve specific goals.
The beginning of User Experience Design
In the early days of the internet, all the websites and apps that came along had clunky interfaces. They featured cluttered home pages, distracting color-schemes and an overload of call-to-actions
As interface design got more nuanced, these designs gave way to more pleasant looking interfaces. The emphasis also shifted to the user’s experience and how smoothly the user could use the app or website. A set of principles were agreed upon and adopted by designers to enhance the user experience.
Over time, certain UX principles were treated as gospel, and new UX designers began following them word-for-word, without wanting to risk experimenting, fearing they annoy their users. But rules are meant to be broken! Once mastered, rules can be broken by designers when they know the purpose for which they are making those decisions, hence tailoring an experience for their users.
Breaking UX Design Principles with a purpose
In fact, some of the most successful companies have dared to defy common UX principles! Let’s take a look at some popular brands that have dared to defy UX principles for a specific intent!
Netflix
When it comes to Netflix, it gets most things right from a user experience perspective but there is still a small feature that has left its users torn: the infamous auto-playing of previews.
Netflix decided to autoplay the previews when a user hovers over the thumbnail. This feature annoyed many users and countless articles, tweets, blog posts were written about it where users complained about how annoying the autoplay feature was. But 4 years after the feature was introduced, it’s still here with Netflix only recently deciding to allow users in 2020 to opt-out manually if they really don’t want it.
Netflix’s director of product innovation Stephen Garcia in 2016 said that the video previews were introduced so that the user is provided with more information about the content and they can quickly decide what to watch instead of endlessly browsing. Their aim was to make users scroll less and watch more. By introducing this feature, they allowed the users to get a little more immersed in the platform.
Netflix hasn’t officially commented on the feature directly after that but most UX designers take an educated guess that the streaming giant with all its abundance of consumer feedback data understood that the autoplay feature received a positive majority and increased the time spent on the platform by the users rather than them dropping off after scrolling a few titles.
Snapchat
For an app that has 238 million daily users, Snapchat has a surprisingly complicated UI. They have resorted to not adopt universal icons. Most elements have no labels and the navigation is extremely complicated without any guidance by Snapchat. Even the screen where users discover new content is slightly intimidating.
Yet the app’s mammoth success suggests that these UX decisions weren’t negatively affecting the platform. In today’s time when a user is presented with complicated user experience, they don’t give the app a second chance. Then what is it that differentiates Snapchat from other apps with bad UX?
The answer lies in its target audience. Snapchat’s primary target group is teenagers.
Snapchat Demographics —
Sean from Usability Geek explains this best —
It is their baffling UX that maintains Snapchat’s relevance to their key demographic: teens and millennials. This target audience is as powerful as it is fickle, and capturing it means keeping Snapchat cool. And nothing kills cool faster than adults.
Snapchat has purposefully made the UI difficult to understand in order to make it difficult for the adults. Most adults wouldn’t bother putting in the effort to understand how to use the app, thus encouraging them to abandon the app. This ensures Snapchat remains cool with only the teens using the platform.
Snapchat’s UI is difficult to crack even for teenagers, but for them, it becomes a game with the incentive of seeming cool and fitting in with the rest of their peers. This keeps the teenagers engaged and makes them come back to the app and keep trying to discover new features.
Snapchat understood the psychology of its users and so made certain features difficult to access intuitively. Only when users spent more time on the platform exploring, would they discover these features and it would make them feel rewarded. This wonderful gamification strategy has been working successfully for Snapchat.
Microsoft Windows
Another example of a company that defies UX norms has to be Microsoft Windows. While direct competitors like MacOS are making huge leaps in terms of modifying and enhancing their UI and UX, it seems like Windows has chosen another direction.
Windows is used around the world in 85% of computer devices. Everything from laptops to desktops to POS terminals in shops. Windows user base consists of traditional users who prefer the classic design, having been used to it for so long. Therefore, Microsoft cannot change the design radically as it would upset its traditional users. Windows, however, is also used by younger and more adaptable target group and Microsoft understood that this set of audience needed a more modern design aesthetic.
Therefore, the company decided to not make consistency in its UI the topmost priority and include applications in both those styles. Some elements have been designed to suit the modern aesthetics but some other apps still follow the old designs. In some cases, there exists more than one application with different designs but performing the same function. For eg: Settings and Control Panel both perform the same task but one is designed with the modern aesthetic and usability in mind, and the other has been kept traditional to not alienate its older audience.
Co-existence of modern and legacy apps —
Final thoughts
These companies defied UX norms for a definite reason, having researched what their target audience prefers. What’s common between all these companies is that they understood their consumers. And that’s what user experience is all about! Understanding your user and then designing products that suit their needs. After all, UX is about coming up with decisions through a process, the last step of which is user testing.
These design decisions would seem like errors for an observer without the consumer data gathered from user tests. These design choices may not work across every case but it certainly did for the companies mentioned above. It’s a clear indication that if it works for you, then it’s right!
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