Demystifying UX Design: Common False Beliefs and Their Remedies: Part 3

Make Your Designs Relevant, Not Just Simple: Best Practices for Simplistic Design

Here are some best practices for achieving true simplicity. In some cases, the result may be that a user interface looks a bit busier because of the addition of more controls and content. But by providing convenience and engagement, those elements can ensure ease of use.

• Align your designs to and leverage user expectations. To achieve this:
  
  • Consistently apply commonly accepted design patterns. For example, on a Web site, you should place global navigation at the top of a page, local navigation on the left side of a page, and contextual modules on the right whenever possible. User interfaces for iPhone and Android mobile devices have different design conventions that designers should follow. For example, to navigate back, users expect a Back button in iPhone apps, but a physical Return button on Android phones. One thing to keep in mind is that we should create new design patterns only when existing solutions do not meet our design needs—as when designing touch interactions for mobile devices or tablets rather than mouse input for Web applications
  • Maintain cross-page consistency. Once users get to know a Web site, they’ll have expectations for the way the rest of the site should look and behave. Meeting their expectations by adhering to the same design standards across an entire site is key to ensuring ease of use.
• First, get users to act, then provide clear feedback. Having clear calls-to-action can greatly reduce the mental effort that is necessary for users to comprehend a page’s content. When you expect that users may need to take further action or refine their actions, the most effective approach is to have them perform an action first, then provide feedback regarding whatever further action is necessary. Here’s an example: Once a user creates a password, you can provide feedback that the password must be longer. This makes the interaction much easier for users than requiring them to learn the full set of rules—for example, that a password must be at least 8 characters in length and contain at least one letter, one digit, and one symbol.
• Provide lots of engaging content. Motivated users tend to find a user interface easier to use than unmotivated users, simply because they are willing to put in more effort to learn their way around a site and are more tolerant of usability issues. Facebook is a great example. It’s not the easiest-to-use Web site. There’s so much going on, the site navigation is confusing, and the timeline is hard to use. However, Facebook users rarely complain about the site’s usability because they’re fully absorbed in the rich social experience that they find there.
• Provide navigation and signposts everywhere. On a large Web site, users often get lost and cannot find their way back. Dead-ends result in high abandonment rates. I’ve seen this happen quite often with designs for very specific workflows such as completing a funds transfer or updating a user’s profile, when there is no global navigation.
• Always let users know what to do next. After completing a task, having to figure out what’s next is a pain. This is the point at which many users leave a Web site. Two ways to improve ease of use and keep users on a site:
  
  • Suggest a next step. For example, provide a link back to the home page.
  • Recommend additional content. For example, tell users that they might be interested in a particular item.
• Use good information-presentation techniques. When designing high-information-density user interfaces, you can apply a number of the design techniques that I discussed in my previous column in this series. They’ll enable you to remove clutter from a busy-looking user interface without taking out content and screen elements that enhance the user experience. These techniques include grouping similar content, aligning text and pictures, and consistently using different colors to indicate different types of content.

True Simplicity: More Than Meets the Eye

As you can see, true simplicity is about more than meets the eye. A visually simplistic user interface may make users’ lives difficult, while a visually busy user interface may make users’ lives easy. It depends on whether a user interface is well designed. If we are designing for users rather than to satisfy our own sense of aesthetics, we want to achieve ease of use.

So, what about aesthetics? Don’t many designers regard Apple user interfaces as being the gold standard for visual appeal? While it’s true that the Apple design language seamlessly integrates a simple look and feel and emotional appeal, their design approach is not the only way to get your target users excited about your application’s user interface.

For example, the eBay user interface also generates a great deal of excitement among its target users. Hardcore users of Reddit.com, a horrendously busy-looking site, think the site is extremely engaging. Many users think that the user interface of the recently released Samsung Galaxy SIII is flashier, sexier, and therefore, more exciting than the more austere user interfaces of Apple products. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. When it comes to simplicity, there is no truer statement.

The take-away message: start with what users want, then design your product’s user interface based on that. Leverage easy-to-understand design patterns and seed your user interface with plentiful, good content. You’ll create a user interface that’s straightforward, functional, and engaging. Visual simplicity should never be the goal. As UX designers, making users’ lives easier should always be our goal. 

Reference

Nielsen, Jakob. Designing Web Usability. Indianapolis: New Riders Publishing, 1999.