An article in the Washington Post, titled “Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software”, caught my eye the other day. It is just one out of a number of similar recent articles criticizing Apple and other tech-mavericks for having lost their knack for usable design. Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini even go as far as claiming that Apple is destroying design, with Google being an accomplice.
I’ll leave it to you to decide how much of that is clickbait and how much is true. However, in my opinion it is us, consumers and tech aficionados who are, at least to some extent, to blame. For the simple reason that we keep loudly demanding our phones, tablets and apps to do more with every update.
Feature creep
The problem is not a lack of simplicity. The problem is the proliferation of features that push an essentially user friendly UI paradigm beyond what it was designed to cope with. You can’t force-fit a car dashboard into a Boeing 787 and expect the end result to be great for pilots. Flying a plane simply demands a more extensive user interface than driving a car and both have to be optimized for their respective range of functionality (this phenomenon is called the “Usability Knee” and is an interesting topic for anyone doing mobile interaction design).
However, imagine Apple or Google announcing an update to iOS or Android which would just focus on making things more streamlined, easier and better, instead of adding lots of new features. The press and every blog’s comments section would explode with ridicule, disdain and a collective outcry of entitlement. We all deserve to get more all the time, right?
And I’m sure we’ve all read software product reviews where a disgruntled expert user proclaims something along the lines of “This product sucks so bad. It doesn’t even have <insert super-obscure poweruser feature>. Don’t waste your money!”. Obviously the product is then also awarded zero stars, regardless of any redeeming qualities the product may have had beyond the missing feature. Welcome to the internet.
Back to Apple (and to a lesser extent Google et al). Their main failing lately is not bad design. The problem is they’re not standing up against the demands of users. The vocal minority. These days, it seems, they’re afraid to make their own choices and stick to them.
Tackling the designer’s dilemma
The more-more-more-attitude puts designers and product marketeers in an uncomfortable position. After all, most products and services are made for a homogeneous segment of a market — not tailored to the exact needs of one specific user. As much as us designers like to (and shareholders expect us to), trying to please everyone is not the answer. Not to mention completely impossible.
But often it takes saying ‘no’ to users to end up with better products. Without saying ‘no’ you end up with user interfaces strained beyond their breaking point: widget panels, split-screen multitasking, 4-finger swipe gestures, picture-in-picture video, location based lockscreen apps and a smorgasbord of different screen dimensions (making things super hard for designers and devs thanks to the overly complicated mechanism called Autolayout).
Personas versus people
The first step towards a solution is knowing your target audience. If you truly have a deep understanding of your target user’s needs and motivations you can confidently make choices during the design process. Many designers and marketing professionals make use of personas for articulating their ‘average user’. The trouble with personas is that they are not real people, but an amalgamation of several personalities and as a result they may turn into a stereotype or -worse- a caricature. At best, they are fictional, made up.
As an alternative there is nothing wrong with taking two or three real, existing persons to design for. If chosen well, the critical needs of these persons will be extremely similar to the rest of your market demographic, but you’ll get the added benefit of dealing with the idiosyncrasies of real human beings to keep you on your toes.
The Minimal Enjoyable Product
Back when I designed user interfaces for televisions our biggest struggle was dealing with legacy features. The marketing guys were convinced that consumers would not accept a new generation TV to have fewer features than the last. So year after year, the feature set of the TVs would grow. The result: bloated remote controls with dozens of mysteriously labeled buttons and long on-screen menus full of technical jargon and trademarked buzzwords. Each new feature may have benefitted a handful of users. But certainly hindered the rest. And it made the design job exceedingly hard.
Each new feature may have benefitted a handful of users. But certainly hindered the rest. And it made the design job exceedingly hard.
Had we designed our TVs for real people rather than hypothetical use case scenarios, we probably could have scrapped 90% of the features. Then hide another 5% somewhere, and finally redesign the remaining 5% to make using the TV more enjoyable. If only we had dared to make bold choices.
When designing your product (or when drafting your functional requirements list) be ruthless in fighting feature creep. A good product is all about offering a satisfying, enjoyable experience. Must-have features are non-negociable. Nice-to-have features are welcome, as long as they are typically part of the main flow and don’t get in the way. Somewhat-handy features are suspect. If in doubt: leave it out.
The best apps, products, and services do one or two things extremely well and do it in a gratifying way that makes us feel awesome.
The best apps, products, and services are those that have razorsharp focus. They do one or two things extremely well and do it in a gratifying way that makes us feel awesome. A ricecooker that makes great rice doesn’t need many features as long as it never fails to cook my rice perfectly and in the process makes me feel like I’m an awesome cook. Conversely an app-controlled smartsteamer with loads of fancy features that make the cooking process elaborate and complicated will make me feel clumsy and inefficient.
Don’t ask; observe
Don’t ask people whether they want those extra features; they’ll say yes. And they genuinely believe these features may come in handy one day without understanding how feature overload will inevitably make their life more difficult. Great designers need the arrogance to ignore what users say and design for what they need. And this often also involves confronting product managers and marketeers.
Great designers need the arrogance to ignore what users say and design for what they need.
Remember the famous story about Steve Jobs not wanting to do user research at Apple? This is what it meant: Apple didn’t listen to what consumers said, but observed what they needed. So the designers could make confident choices in their product and software design process. It seems lately Apple started actually listening to consumers and now it all goes mildly pearshaped.
TL;DR
The best advice I can give to UX designers is to make bold choices. Make choices for your users. Leave lots of stuff out, and don’t be afraid of reading an angry review demanding feature X to be added to your product ASAP.
You want your product to be user-friendly and pleasant to use? Make bold choices, and believe in them.
