Breaking the Design
I can’t quite shake this concept of avoiding directness and simplicity in design to arrive at a better product—counterintuitive as that ought to be. Along comes Barry Schwartz (who I still regret never taking a class from) with another angle on the issue.
Schwartz talks about societal reliance on rules and incentives “to spare us from thinking.” Overreliance on rules and incentives prevents disaster—but they do so by ensuring mediocrity. Incentives shape the way we think about questions, and encourage us to think in particular ways—usually ways that are self-interested.
Using incentives to shape behavior is a key area of thought and research in politics and economics, and also in design. We’re instructed to make our interfaces as clear and obvious and navigable as possible, because that’s what the user wants—as Steve Krug puts it, the user is screaming It’s the title of Krug’s book. “Don’t make me think!”
That doesn’t seem right to me. Surely we do want our users to think. We don’t (usually) want them to think about the interface—rather, we want them to think about what we’re selling (or what we’re saying). Is the “don’t make me think” model of design promoting a culture of users that gloss websites rather than engage with them?
We already know that users See, e.g., “How Little Do Users Read?”skim rather than engage content on the web, they gloss text instead of reading it, they bounce off to other pages quickly, following hyperlinks, advertisements, and any of the other distractions our designs (not to mention the browsers they sit in) provide. I’ve always thought (and I think it’s a common perception) that the best way to combat the myriad distractions of the modern web is by keeping the design from getting in the way of the content.
Maybe, instead, we should be placing the design squarely in the way of the content. Rather than simplifying the experience, we should make it more involved, drawing the user in through more complex interfaces. Such an interface must work not by staying out of the user’s way, but by engaging the user in a way that delights and fascinates without annoying or frustrating.
Aarron Walter discusses one way of approaching this with his talks on Emotional Interface Design—going beyond mere usability to create interfaces that are playful and fun. It’s not the only way. It may be as simple as For example, Thinking For A Living. breaking the flow of the text, or it may require more complicated arrangements.
An interface that gets out of the way of its user is not a bad interface. But let’s agree on on this: a design that’s so usable that its users are free to ignore the content it’s presenting, though not a disaster, is still a failure of design. Let’s make our users think.
