Source: statera.com

3 ways to design if your aim is not ease but excellence

Now that we have an app for everything, a lot of things are easier. The effort is taken out of a lot of our daily activities. But are our lives better? I believe effortlessness has a negative impact on our happiness. And the promise of effortlessness that is not fulfilled is one of the greatest irritations. Maybe understanding the dualities around effort and efficiency can help us design better technology.

Hurdles and quality

A few weeks ago I was in a meeting with some people from Usabilla. Usabilla is a user feedback tool. They introduced themselves as Customer Success Managers. You can dismiss this as newspeak, but I believe it puts people in a nice mindset of what their job is.

At first I was very critical about the user experience of the Usabilla tools. In my opinion they did not follow best practices when it comes to creating a good user experience for the end user. Their interface required too many clicks for my taste, putting to much cognitive load onto the user. As an exercise and a tool for discussion, I built a prototype of a new interface for their tool that reduced the amount of clicks of the user by 75%.

When we talked about my solution, they were impressed by the User Experience ingenuity. But in the discussion that followed I learned a lot about quality of feedback. Although they recognized the improved User Experience, my design allowed them to articulate their own philosophy to user feedback very clearly. They learned that slowing down the user a little bit, forcing them to think a little bit longer, requiring them to put in a little more energy resulted in higher quality feedback. Maybe some people will drop out of the feedback process because it takes to many clicks and requires to much effort. But their aim is quality, not quantity. They believe that for an organization to be successful, it is much better to have lower quantity in feedback and a higher quality.

This also ties back into their job titles of Customer Success Managers: their end goal is success of the organization that uses their tools and the best way to do this is by quality feedback. And there are also other feedback tools in the market place that might have a focus on high quantity. So their positioning is clear.

“In our complex world, efficiency should not be the ultimate goal.” — General Stanley A McChrystal, Team of teams

I quite like the idea that introducing some hurdles to activities increases the quality of the work. This is the opposite of mainstream User Experience thinking. Normally we think that reducing hurdles creates more quality, but slowing down can sometimes be more helpful then rushing through things. It has to do with the attention we give to things, the focus.

False promises and irritation

Modern technology holds a promise. It promises to make our tasks easier. And this is true. A lot of tasks that took our parents or grand parents a lot of effort are now effortless. Because of that our productivity is much higher. A lot of tedious tasks are automated and other task don’t take as much effort. The effort that is reduced is on many levels:

• the tasks take less time,
• we don’t have to think about them so hard and
• our performance is measured immediately.

When my father had to look up information, he had to go to the library, search though a cabinet of index cards, go though several books and write down the information on a piece of paper. Now we can do a Google search and the result is presented to us in a fraction of a second:

About 2.680.000.000 results (0,45 seconds)

Google even has algorithms in place that tell you which of the 2.7 million results is the best. It’s fast, you don’t have to think and performance indicators are at the top of your screen. But what if you can’t find what you are looking for? What if your search query requires you to go through pages and pages of search results and then you still don’t find it? You never learned how to do complex queries and never studied document and knowledge management strategies. You are unable to formulate and execute a complex search strategy. You are unable to tap into the advanced features of the Google search bar. The promise of easy is broken. You get irritated. To top it all off, you are in a bubble controlled by algorithms that determines what information you can and cannot find.

Failing in the UX game

Similar false promises and irritations apply to bad UX. The UX expectations bar on modern applications has risen dramatically over the last years. We expect every app to work effortlessly and be perfectly tailored to our personal needs at any particular time. Big corporations spend a lot of time and money on creating engaging User Experiences, because that is where the battles of competitive advantages are waged and won today. Everybody expects Google-level-of-search on each website and application, Netflix-type-of-personalization and Zappos-type-of-service levels of each technology. But this is difficult. This involves doing user research right, asking the right questions, letting go of your cherished assumptions, pushing design best practices to the next level, matching design specs to back-end systems, engaging stakeholders, building a business case, restructuring your organization, etc. This is extremely complex and very difficult to get right. A lot of companies are in this game, but not all succeed. The market share of Apple is built largely on their excellence in getting the UX right, but it also has cracks. We have grown to expect so much, that it’s becoming impossible to live up to our standards. There is so much irritation when things are not perfect.

I once heard a story about Wifi on airplanes. It was a story about the first time an airline was able to put Wifi on a plane. They announced it at the beginning of the flight. People were over the moon with happiness. They were relieved from the strain of not being able to read their Facebook time during flight. They were in heaven. People started to applaud, shout and cry of happiness. 4 minutes later the Wifi crashed and never gut up during the flight. People were devastated. This was the worst airline ever, they were robbed, they asked for their money back and trashed the airline on social media once they landed and got their Wifi back.

That is how quickly our expectations shift from being exited in heaven to being irritated because we feel entitled.

It’s a tightrope. Expectation management is tough. And when marketing comes into the game, it gets even more difficult to live up to expectations. Marketing lives of off inflated expectations.

The value of effort

The story we live in is that technology is going to make everything quick and easy. Technology is going to take over more and more. Our narrative is made up of the idea that there should be an app for everything, that AI and robots will take over more and more of the tasks that take us a lot of effort. What doesn’t fit into this story is that idea of putting effort into something leads to more focus, satisfaction and happiness. Technology is helpful in a lot of areas, but it also disconnects us from the reality we live in. More and more people are spending more and more of their time in the virtual reality. The Matrix is becoming reality. We are moving away from the here and now. And research shows that this is not making us happier. All the comfort and all the ease make people feel empty and disconnected. The privacy we gave up didn’t give us in return what we expected. We want a lot of things, but are more and more unwilling to do what it takes to get it.

“Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” — Unkwown

I for one started an experiment last year. I started to introduce more and more discomfort into my life. Basically I’m taking the long hard stupid approach to more and more things. And it turns out that the more long, hard and stupid things I do, the more fulfilling my activities become, the more focus I have, the more connected I become. I’m not here to recommend this to anyone. I just want to point to the other side of effortlessness. If we look at things from a happiness point of view, less effort doesn’t necessarily lead to more happiness. Especially if we look at things on the long run. There is a difference between short term joy and long term fulfillment. When you start to think about it, there are a lot of things that lead to short term joy but to long term emptiness.

“But ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.” — Ed Catmull, Creativity Inc.

How we should design

If we agree on the value of effort, the question is how can we incorporate this into design. If think there are a couple of things you can do:

• Incorporate speed bumps into your flow. If every step is fast and easy you loose focus and attention. To some things you don’t want to pay attention, but to some you do. Sometimes an extra click serves a purpose.
• Add a little slowness to communicate security and trust. Some processes in apps have complex back end processes that should be handled with care. Even if you are able to present the user with immediate results of their action, taking some time to show them the result can tell them that you take the security in their process seriously.
• Making task a little difficult to raise engagement. I once read a study about Facebook likes. The researchers compared like buttons on webpages to posting something on Facebook the long, hard, stupid way: copying the link from you browser / opening Facebook / then pasting the link to create a post. Not surprisingly the people who took the long road were far more engaged and were far better ambassadors then the “cheap” clicks on a like button.

Walk the extra mile

If you want to engage people on a deeper level, it’s okay to ask a little bit more of them. Just like people are willing to walk an extra mile for a better cup of espresso, people are willing to click an extra time if they really dig your service. Extra clicks have to make sense of course. Eliminate all unnecessary actions and focus on meaningful actions. I’m all for simplicity, but it mustn’t become a fetish, a KPI. If people have to put in a little extra effort, their fulfillment will be higher as well. When you have to walk that extra mile to your favorite espresso bar, the effort and engagement alone will make the coffee taste much better. If you take a shortcut and use the time you save to do something meaningful and fulfilling, that’s cool. But if you spend your days taking shortcuts to other shortcuts, that probable won’t lead to heaps of happiness.

A little thinking

There is a classic book all User Experience Designers should read called Don’t make me think. It’s a book on usability and tells you to eliminate all unnecessary interactions. It doesn’t tell you how to create meaningful interactions. Stopping and thinking once in a while can also be useful, even on the web.