Design Has Gone Too Far for Simplicity and We Need to Fix It.
The
design revolution, sparked by a decade of complicated and
labyrinth-like UIs, has resulted in our current worship of minimalism.
But now we’ve gone too far. Instead of “make things simpler,” we’ve
moved onto “make simple things.” In our pursuit of design simplicity,
we’ve lost sight of the larger picture.
We prefer fewer but more powerful choices. We prefer likes instead of comments. We prefer minimalism over a library of actions.
As
a consequence, our applications now lack depth. Depth, which is
different from but often confused with complexity, is a design element
that we desperately need. Depth is what lets a professional
artist create a beautiful flyer with the same Microsoft Office
application that a second grader uses to create her first banner. Depth
brings a sense of accomplishment, an increase in utility, and a very
real feel of mastery. Users of deep products feel a sense of loyalty
with the application, wherein the mastery of the product becomes a part
of who they are and what they can do.
How then do we bring back depth into our designs without needless complexity? Is it even possible in the first place?
For
that, we need look no further than in the fields of both education and
gaming. One design philosophy that both game designers and teachers have
is the concept of flow channels. In the gaming industry specifically,
game designers know this as the graph that indicates the stage of
difficulty versus the amount of experience the user has accrued. Too
hard and players give up. Too easy and they tune out due to boredom.
Photo Credits to “The Art of Game Design” book by Jesse Schell
Likewise,
no experienced high school teacher would start the school year with how
to manipulate imaginary numbers: that would be too difficult and risk
tuning students out with frustration. Yet they also can’t make the
course too easy with simple arithmetic because that would just bore
students instead. In the end, instructors and game designers want the
material to start easy but get progressively harder in a constant and
manageable pace. A successful curriculum, like a good game, would see
the chart rendered into a wave function:
Photo Credits to “The Art of Game Design” book by Jesse Schell
Games
and teachers have known about this design philosophy for decades due to
their product’s necessity in maintaining audience interest, but this
concept is critical for every single product: technical or not. It is
easy to see how this applies to products with complicated UIs or complex
professional functions. In fact, that is what sparked our century’s
interest in design in the first place. But the lower end of the spectrum
has been neglected and UX designers have taken things to the extreme.
Instead of adopting a progressive difficulty curve and lowering the
graph intercept, they’ve gone to the mindset of “simplify everything”
with an endless horizontal line.
Complexity is not bad.
As
long as it’s introduced subtly and in a gradual manner, it stands as a
natural byproduct of knowledge and usage. Complexity when done right
means more variety, more impact, and more depth. For a product, this
means a greater value proposition and larger usability. For a user, this
means a more powerful product.
The
difficulty in accomplishing this is that it requires designers to
create an artificial and progressive workflow process. By pushing users
through a voluntary funnel, designers can naturally lead more curious
users into exploring more creative uses by giving them the tools to do
so. The process itself should naturally introduce features one by one,
with each additional introduction bestowing the user new skills and
abilities.
This
is why designers need to rethink how they perceive their users. In
addition to characterizing user personas as a niche with its specific
demographic wants and needs, an additional consideration should be made
for how that demographic learns.
This
tip is one of the only ways to max one of the game stats in play. It
deserves a little more real estate than a loading screen. Photo Credits
to DocPop.org
Currently,
presenting tidbits and trivia is the most common method of products
attempting to do this. Unfortunately, most of the time these efforts are
either ignored by the user because they’re served on loading screens,
or are reduced to bare factual details that grant no value. The loading
screen is too short a process for introducing deep functionality. Even
with the best attention-grabbing graphics, loading screen real estate is
at most suited for event awareness or the simplest of game facts.
At
this point, some of you might scratch your heads. The act of designing a
funneling process seems incredibly difficult. If even such a popular
game as Fallout Shelter cannot perfect it (though the rest of its
channel flow is pretty well done), maybe it’s not the worth the trouble
to consider: especially when the investment in design seems so mammoth
and the goal so hard to measure even if done right. If my product is
neither recreational nor educational, perhaps I can afford to proceed
without this thinking… right?
Wrong.
Every Product is By Nature Educational
From
the mere fact that every product must be used for the first time, each
and every single product has to possess a way for the users to learn how
to handle it. This by nature means that all products must be able to
teach their users. For centuries, we achieved this through manuals. Even
now, many things that we use still come with one: whether it be virtual
or physical.
And
that should not come as a surprise. Designers already know this and
incorporate this into the UX through elements that build user discovery:
constraints, signifiers, and other mechanisms like forcing functions.
These are all great tools for what I think is the ultimate goal of depth
and designing a channel flow: affordance discovery. At it’s simplest,
affordance discovery is designing for users to find out how they can get
new uses out of existing or new features. In context with a channel
flow funnel, affordance discovery is the mechanism to subtly present new
cases and usage to the user.
Clean Master
One
great and simple example I found lie in the smartphone application
Clean Master. Advertised specifically as a way to free up smartphone
RAM, the application begins with a very simple UI that displays a
headboard with some basic commands.
The ordinal procedure of the application goes from Left to Right. Application pictures courtesy of Clean Master.
Due
to its marketing and name however, the user naturally just wants to use
the application to remove the junk files. Easily enough, simple
discovery and signifiers allow the user to find this functionality
through the representation of the trashcan. A simple clicks brings us to
the next step, in where the application provides appropriate feedback
to the user but simplifies the necessary input to a very simple and
direct “Clean Junk” call-to-action at the bottom.
Where
affordance discovery and the user design funnel begins is in the 3rd
and last photo, where the user has already accomplished his main goal.
At this stage, the user has already completed his desired action: but
instead of returning to the initial starting page, he is led to one that
displays some of the other functionalities of the application.
These
additional functionalities are in-line with exactly the type of
services that the user persona would find of interest. By displaying it
after the application has already fulfilled the user’s initial goal, the
presentation of the material in no way obstructs from the original
purpose. Single-goal users will at this point end the application,
satisfied that they’ve accomplished their desire. But those more curious
will voluntarily continue and be led to discovering the application’s
additional functionalities.
That
is the goal of a channel flow funnel. It allows users with flat needs
to complete their objective with no impedance, but also voluntarily
gives those curious and wiling to learn additional functionality in a
nonintrusive way. With each product being unique to itself however, the
best methods of affordance discovery and their flow funnel will differ.
In those times of design formation, ask the same questions as would a
teacher or game designer: “How can I get them interested in the next
step?”
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