Unless Your Product Enjoys Long Walks On The Beach, I Don’t Want To Be Engaged With It

First appeared in my “Usable Thoughts” section of my private User Defenders podcast email list.

Engage [en-geyj]: to occupy the attention or efforts of (a person or persons)

Somewhere along the way the “Internet Marketing” world convinced us designers that we should keep users on our sites as long as possible. “Put the ads ‘above the fold’.” “Reduce abandon rates”, they said. “It’ll be fun”, they said.

This may have made sense in the early days, but nowadays unless you’re a social network (or a blog), this is the old way of thinking. Our field has largely become product and SaaS-centric. Much of what we do online today is task-based. Our users are trying to accomplish something (and fast!) before the next demand upon their attention occurs in our noisy world.

Since we’re probably not designing another social network (Ello. Goodbye?),

We should be designing experiences that get people away from our interface and into the result of their important tasks as quickly as possible.

Ben Callahan enlightened us to this reality in Episode 008 of User Defenders podcast.

This is why “Conversational UI’s” are such a big deal now. They’ve become the path of least resistance to accomplishing important tasks…unless you’re Siri (don’t get me started).

We should rethink “engagement” as less about keeping them on our site as long as possible, and more about getting them what they need, exactly when they need it, with as little effort and unnecessary complexity as possible.