Shit Loops In Design
When the user interface hits the fan
I t’s a Monday morning. It’s raining and you’re squeezing yourself into a bus full of wet, grumpy commuters. People are standing close to each other. So close that you can barely move. You desperately attempt to picture yourself in a different place, when suddenly a friendly female voice emanates from your pocket, breaking the sheer silence:
“Calling Linda Meggendorfer.”
Your blood pressure rises as you realize you haven’t called Linda since your last class reunion. You want to stop the phone from dialing and desperately try to get it out of your pocket while prodding passengers standing around you.
You hammer on the screen and the fact that Linda already picked up doesn’t seem to stop you. All of a sudden, Safari fires up and opens the socially awkward web site you visited before going to bed last night. People start to notice you, your phone, and voilà…
You just lost your social credibility in one single moment. You’ve become the victim of a shit loop.
From time to time, a shit loop happens to every one of us. Simply put, it’s a series of unwanted actions happening in a user interface that take us down a path that gets darker and darker the further we go.
The reason these frustrating loops happen in the first place is often caused by simple flaws. Most of these flaws remain undiscovered as long as we are not in a situation where we’re stressed. As soon as time and attention are limited and our intuition takes over… That’s when shit starts to happen.
So what are the scenarios where these things come up and how can we potentially prevent at least some of these accidental actions?
1. The “Meggendorfer” Call
Apple could prevent “Meggendorfer” calls from happening by allowing users to opt out from both Siri and voice control in an easy way. But they don’t. So for now, we’re stuck with initiating a few unwanted calls and awkward Siri conversations while comfortably sitting on our phones…
I have a bow on my home button and when it is in my pocket it cause voice control to come on all the time! I just really want to turn voice control off! how in the world do I do that? – Apple support
If you were wondering about the answer, it’s tricky and @AppleSupport probably wouldn’t be able to squeeze it into a tweet.
The trigger is only one part of the interaction though.
Cancelling, and communicating the current state is another. In this case, is cancelling obvious?
Once you start a call on iOS, you get a green status bar indicator. This indicator sticks to the top while switching between apps. So iOS basically teaches you: “Hey! You can use the home button to minimize active apps. They will keep running in the background and you can easily get them back by tapping on the bar.”
However, in the case of voice control, tapping on the “Home” button actually cancels the call.
No big deal, right?
Well… Not until you desperately try to stop the call from happening. Once you start the interaction, there is very limited time for cancellation and you might be desperately looking for a cancel button. But you won’t find one.
Unlike the alarm app, which has clear on-screen buttons, voice dial doesn’t:
Even though the home button seems like a fair guess to cancel an action, it’s not always obvious. In some cases, subtle differences in behavior can make an interaction’s outcome become somewhat ambiguous: First, we learned that the “Home” button minimizes a call. We feel inclined to think that this would work the same way here. But it it doesn’t. It’s voice control.
Takeaway: When an interaction has limited cancellation time, make sure it’s easy to stop.
2. The Unlucky Tap
Imagine you use search in one of your favorite apps. You happily type, get a few suggestions, and eventually tap one one of the results. All good. Right?
Sure. Except that right before you tapped on the very item you actually wanted, it was replaced with another one as search found more accurate results in the meantime.
No big deal, right?
Well… It depends on the situation, doesn’t it? A bit of stress, low phone battery or screen sharing in a meeting filled with managers, all of a sudden, things are quite different.
Your neighbor from 10C with the weird hair might get messaged, awkward content could show up and reveal the very things you worked so hard to keep private.
A nice way to prevent unlucky taps from happening is to add a “tap-lock” to applications.
So what is a tap-lock?
A tap-lock is a simple protection to prevent erroneous search navigation. When a search result set updates, it doesn’t accept any taps during 100 ms after populating its new entries.
Tapping at the very moment where content was updated needs the user to tap again. This should hopefully be less painful than losing current context, loading a new view and hitting the back button.
Takeaway: Consider cancelling user input when critical elements like buttons or navigation just moved.
3. The Shortcut That Wasn’t There
Adobe products are lovely tools. They have more shortcuts than grains of sand on a typical west coast beach. And they can be used for tons of things they weren’t originally designed for.
Out of the many unexpected frustrations that can happen in complex interfaces, there is one that clearly stands out for me: accidential shortcuts.
Especially when you’re just getting started.
There you are, proud of yourself that you’re learning a new tool. As a reward, you help yourself to a nice bowl of frosted flakes and eat it in front of your screen. While operating the keyboard one-handedly you accidentally strike some wrong keys…
The whole user interface just turned upside down like the Vale of Shadows in Stranger Things and your motivation and eagerness to learn is seriously endangered.
No big deal, right?
Well it kind of is. Unless you know how to restore the UI with the equivalent shortcut, navigating through a myriad of options and fly-outs can be an incredibly frustrating and cumbersome experience.
One way I could imagine to approach this is to add on-screen shortcut information the first time you trigger a non-standard shortcut (like copy / paste etc.).
The shortcut will remain visible for a few seconds the very first time you execute it. This way, the user gets enough time to learn why and how he or she made “that” happen and can hopefully safely restore the UI to its desired state, while learning something new along the way.
Takeaway: make sure users can learn from their actions and educate them about the things they did right or wrong. Try to look at sources of potential shit loops as an opportunity to educate users.
Situational context plays a huge role in how users interact with an interface. Stress and distractions can turn the most minor flaw into a major problem. While we run most user tests in a quiet and chilled environment, it’s often the uncanny moments that reveal things we may have overlooked.
So what can you do then?
No… You’re not going to scare the **** of users during a test. Instead, I’d try to go through the various thoughts a user might have when looking at the different elements in your interface and try to mitigate potential shit loops in advance.
The above suggestions obviously all come with a grain of salt with each being an example of this thought process. After all, the moment we stop trying to improve things, even the ones that are well established, is the moment we don’t improve anything at all.
Ever encountered a shit loop? How would you prevent it from happening in the future?
Thanks for reading! Please hit ♥︎ if you liked this.
Lothar Meggendorfer was a German illustrator and early cartoonist known for his pop-up books. Linda Meggendorfer is a made up name. I liked the sound of it.
