Opinionated versus choice
Years ago someone shared the idea in design that having opinions is better than offering choices.
This fits especially well with consumer focused mobile and web apps where I spend most of my time creating.
It’s easy to throw a bunch of options on a screen, call it a day, and let the user figure out what they want to do. But it’s a trap.
When you come back weeks or months later you won’t remember why you had all those choices, and you’ll just add more to solve a new problem you’ve identified.
Sitting with the issue though, understanding it, really digging into and owning the design, means you can have an opinionated view.
Instead of offering buttons A and B, decide what’s best for the people that will use your software and give them button A.
You may be wrong, but instead of confusion you’ll offer clarity. They’ll know whether button A is for them. If it’s not, and you want them as a customer, then you have a different decision tree to follow.
When I’m sketching out interfaces I like to find the happy path, and then cut off all the branches that aren’t useful for the problem we’re trying to solve. The more complex and fancy and nuances my designs, the more often users get completely lost. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t account for edge cases, but the happy path should catch most things a user needs. And if it’s not, there’s a good chance you don’t know your user.
Year after year I’m blown away by just talking to people. I show them the designs I’ve meticulously sculpted to perfection and gasp in awe as they fail to perform a seamingly obvious action.
My favorite recent example was a button on a screen. I asked the user to press the button on two separate occassions. They pressed a different button.
This is no fault of the user, but a fault of my own as the designer. The interface had too much complexity and too many things to choose from. Of course it’s easy to grow immune to all these options and focus on the current feature that’s getting tested. But a new user sees everything at once, wants to accomplish the task they’re given, and can’t compartmentalize parts of the design, instead they see the whole.
If you have ten buttons that a user can press and are debating between the perfect copy for button eleven you may have missed the point entirely.