UX myth - flow is bad because it’s too long

I bet you’ve done this at least a few times in your career. While designing a flow in the product you’ve decided to base on the math — a strong tool for a designer. You can count the grid system, set padding and margins, or adjust the font sizes. However, the math may also give you wrong assumptions and makes your design bad especially while designing the UX.

Myth — the flow is bad because it’s too long.

A common quote said by many designers is

I don’t like this flow because it’s too long.

As a society, we like straight and logical answers. “If a flow has fewer steps then it’s better for the user”. It sounds reasonable but at the same time, we forget to do a base action of the logic — asking questions. Are you sure that users don’t like something because of the length or there may be other reasons? Maybe the flow requires hard actions? Maybe the flow isn’t clear? Maybe the user doesn’t understand why he needs to do something?

Truth — the flow is bad because it’s not thoughtful.

Let’s bring the example. You’re a designer of the social media app.

• Your goal: Showing well-matching content to the user.
• The solution?: Collect all of the necessary information about what users like to adjust the photos and videos they would like to see.
• How?: Ask him what he likes in the onboarding process after he made the account… BEEP, stop for a moment.

Something that may sound reasonable and logical at first look, doesn’t mean it really is. Imagine that you made a flow like this in the app and 50% of the users leave before they even finish this onboarding. What do you think is the reason for that?

You guess the onboarding flow is too long so you wonder how to reduce steps — instead of asking yourself fundamental questions:

• Why are we required to answer these questions at this stage? -
• Maybe we shouldn’t ask him for anything and collect informations about what he likes should be done later when he get’s familiar with the app and checked how it works?
• Maybe we should collect information piece-by-piece for a few days?

The user wouldn’t say the real reasons

The user often would tell you that he doesn’t like the product because of the X while he really meant Y. Often the feedback like:

„The process is too long”

really may mean the process asks for a lot of steps and the user doesn’t know why. Maybe the user was struggling with errors during this or the flow looked suspiciously for him because it was asking for too many things. Your goal as a designer is to make research and dig deeper to find the most likely assumptions.

Solution — simplicity over steps

The user comes to the designer and says „Hey my leg hurts when I touch it” and the designer answer „Then don’t touch it, problem solved.”

Common and bad practice that designers think about is reducing screens of the flow by placing more steps on one screen. Instead of trying to ask how to make steps more simple. I’d recommend to you divide the path to more screens but ask for less per screen.

It gives a feeling of SIMPLICITY while you’re able to quickly finish the task and go further to another. What’s funny — you can have the same amount of information to ask about but the way of that how you do it is remembered by the user.