Easy UX: A Common Misconception
As UX designers, we should always aim to make things as easy as possible for users, right? Wrong. Here’s why.
At some point in your career, you’ve likely been told that good UX is about making things as easy for users to use as possible.
In fact, you’ve probably heard it more than once. You may have read something along the lines of UX design being the process of making things effortless for users or been told that your job as an Experience Designer is to make it so that users can complete tasks as fast as possible.
However, while ease of use is often hailed as the main objective of product design, it should not always be the holy grail.
Yes, as UX Designers, we certainly should aim to make it easier for users to achieve their goals. However, contrary to popular belief, good UX is not always about making things as easy as possible to use.
Here’s why:
Good UX is about ensuring that users have the best possible experience when using a product. And while in some cases the best experience for users is one that is easy and efficient, many times making things a bit harder will actually provide users with a better experience.
Yes, you read that right.
There are many instances where the user experience is actually improved by making things less effortless or intuitive.
Take the Amazon Echo.
The Echo makes it extremely easy for users to order something via a simple voice command. So easy, that in fact, there have been many instances of frustrated users who have unintentionally ordered things as Alexa overheard or misunderstood their conversations. There are even a few funny stories of accidental orders that happened because Alexa overheard something that was said on TV, like when someone’s Echo placed an order for cat food, after overhearing a commercial featuring a man asking Alexa to buy the pet product or when a slew of people mistakenly ordered dollhouses after their device overheard the news broadcasting a story of a girl who accidentally ordered a dollhouse via Alexa.
While the Echo may seem to be so easy and intuitive, to these frustrated users, it’s effortlessness actually made for a subpar user experience.
Contrast the Echo’s easy and frictionless approach with that of the typical e-commerce checkout process, which takes longer and is slightly more complex.
With some form of required confirmation as part of the checkout process, be it a fingerprint approval, a password prompt, or a confirm button, one may think that users might find it frustrating or unnecessarily time-consuming. However, the vast majority of users will happily press ‘confirm’ or enter their password to approve a purchase, as they understand that the slight difficulty helps them avoid accidental purchases.
Another example that demonstrates this idea is the process of deleting an iPhone app.
Apple makes it very easy for users to delete an app on their phone, by simply holding down the app, clicking the “x” and then pressing “delete”. This process is so fast and simple, that many users, have at some point “pocket-deleted” an app, or have distractedly pressed the wrong thing when trying to rearrange their apps, resulting in an accidental deletion.
While it may seem to be great that iPhone users can accomplish their goal of deleting an app with such ease, to these users who have unwittingly deleted an app, this lack of friction actually detracted from their experience.
Contrast Apple’s easy deleting process with Mailchimp’s slightly more time-consuming approach.
Instead of just allowing users to delete data with few clicks, Mailchimp requires users to type in a command, such as the word “delete” in order to confirm their intent. While this method requires extra effort and is less efficient, the majority of users view it as a help rather than a hindrance, since it serves to ensure that they will not have to go through the hassle of inadvertently deleting something.
As these examples illustrate, making things a bit harder for users is not always a bad thing. When implemented correctly, a slightly longer or more complex flow, additional password prompt, or an extra confirmation button, helps ensure that users fully understand what they are doing, which in turn prevents accidental actions or errors.
Ultimately, while we want to help users accomplish things in the best way possible, we also need to ensure that those times when users will not want to do something are taken into account. So, rather than aiming for ease of use, we should instead center our objectives around our users, and their needs, even if that might mean making things a bit harder to use.
