Reducing the number of interactions isn’t important.
Reducing cognitive load is.
My technical partner and I were set on designing the best time picker component ever. We were building a product which would deliver coaching to employees. The usual flow for picking a time and date wouldn’t work well for our product. We had to support a couple of different use cases in the same flow and this would result in a UX with more steps than necessary. So we had to innovate.
We decided to take to the whiteboard and hash out an elegant solution to the problem. After an hour and a half of brainstorming we had come up with a fantastic solution. It covered all the use cases and minimized the number of clicks required to input the information required. We gave ourselves a pat on the back and went home for the weekend.
Next week my partner built the thing and I ran it through a couple of usability tests. Oh…the horror! I sat in front of the screencasts rubbing my eyes in disbelief as users struggled to use our component. The user just didn’t get the elegance of our solution! It was so easy! What were they doing?! In reality, we had been the dummies here.
We had failed to respect the mental models of our users. They had been using date and time pickers for years and had built up an expectation of how they should work. In subverting the design to reduce the number of clicks we ended up creating a confusing mess.
After a few iterations trying to fix the problem we decided to go back to the flow that they would expect with the additional steps tacked on. Yes, more interactions were required but users didn’t have to think as much. The problem was fixed and users happily followed through.
The key learning; aim to reduce the cognitive load, not the number of interactions. Don’t make users think about your interface. Where possible use standard components. Most of the time people don’t have the time or inclination to learn a brand new spangly way of doing things. They just want to get the job done.
