User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play

by Cliff Kuang

Our design team at Dalberg recently interviewed potential customers for a mobile savings service in Indonesia, and found that they understood and appreciated the value of their savings if it were converted into more familiar units, such as kilograms of rice or liters of cooking oil. This is particularly true for the digital savings accounts that our client, a mobile operator, was bringing to market. Digital money is much less tangible than physical currency, so the metaphor of oil or rice increased confidence for new users of the service.

If you are poor, then your stored wealth must always work hard for you. It must do more than one thing. Our Western mental model of “locking things up” is clearly not the right metaphor for these and the billions of other unbanked people throughout the developing world.

One common approach that I have used throughout my work is to ask the user to sketch the way something works from memory. This exercise can be particularly good for dense interfaces such as a television remote control.

I then ask the users to narrate the steps they go through to complete a simple task (something designers call a “think-aloud”).

Miller’s law: The average person can keep only seven (plus or minus two) items in their working memory.

User experience should support the entire user journey, not just a single moment or interaction.

Even successful consumer-driven companies such as Marriott and Disney can find it difficult to step back and look objectively from the customer’s point of view across every step of their journey, given how their businesses are typically organized into functional silos such as marketing, product management, and customer support, and channels like retail and digital. It is always an eye-opening experience when you map out in detail all the different hoops that the average user must jump through. These blind spots can be a huge barrier to an effective user-friendly experience,

Your client might assume that it all starts when the customer walks into their store or opens their app, when in fact there might be many factors, and earlier experiences, that shape the user experience long before any direct point of engagement. These neglected spaces—before, between, or after direct product touch-points—are often the best design opportunities, as they can be strengthened with feedback to better connect the dots across the entire journey in unexpected and often delightful ways.

Ritual-based, habit-forming design is a frontier for our work at Dalberg and a long-term goal for many designers tackling broad social issues.

“As we did, we made notes with smiley faces next to elements that customers enjoyed and sad faces at places where they hit a snag—an example of using design to simplify the feedback mechanism. We’ve emphasized to engineers, product managers, and designers that functionality isn’t enough anymore. We have to build emotion into the product.”

We even ask users to write breakup letters to products and services that no longer work for them. What you learn from these letters is that user-friendly design is about much more than usability.

The moment of truth will come sooner than you think: when you first put your design in front of someone, with no direction or explanation.

The first moment when you see your work through the user’s eyes is priceless. You are confronted with so many tiny problems that somehow remained hidden, despite your best efforts. You often wish you could stop time and take your prototype back to the shop to change just a few small things. Soon enough, you can, and you will continue to refine the design … over and over again. The feedback cycle between designer and user is the beating heart of the user-friendly world.18

His research led to the widespread adoption of Miller’s law as a rule of thumb by designers to reduce complexity and resist the pressure to lard products with more features.

An early ad asked: “Since computers are so smart, wouldn’t it make sense to teach computers about people, instead of teaching people about computers?”

Amazon turned user-friendly design into a decisive competitive advantage by patenting its one-click feature, which removed nearly all checkout friction and brought instant gratification to the web. It was the single most valuable button ever created—until the invention of Facebook’s Like button in 2009.

Google’s signature “one box” design was meant to translate the push-button simplicity of a Polaroid camera to a monumental task: finding any given piece of information amid a limitless universe of knowledge.

Just like the Sony Walkman in the late 1970s, the iPod ushered in a wave of gadget adoption that was driven by user-experience innovations rather than new functionality. The iPod click wheel embodied Apple’s long-held belief in the seamless integration of hardware and software.

Disney’s MagicBand system augured a future in which the physical world would respond to our needs before we were even aware of them. The system was meant to be magical, eliminating the regular friction of daily life—keys, checkouts, lines—and in so doing, fulfill the expectations of a new generation weaned on smartphones.

One of the chief reasons that some products aggravate us is that the mental model is nonexistent or confusing.

The entirety of Dropbox’s success—its explosive user growth, thousands of employees, a company valued at nearly $10 billion—lay in providing a mental model where none had existed before.

Today, Fitts is best known in the world of human-computer interaction as the discoverer of Fitts’s law, which undergirds the buttons we use in computer interfaces. The law provides a mathematical formulation of an intuitive truth: buttons are easier to find when they’re bigger and closer at hand.

This idea of not letting your own hand obscure the action on-screen is actually behind one of the design details that fueled Uber’s rise. Initially, the app had you drop a pin with your fingertip to mark your location. But that meant your fingertip actually obscured the location you were trying to mark. Uber soon revamped its app, so that you moved the map while the pin stayed centered on the screen.

One of the reasons that we don’t do well with long-term behavior change is that we lack an ability to see things working. To get people to change their behavior, they’d need to get feedback that showed them, immediately, the longer-term effects of driving better. It wasn’t enough to drive better for a few minutes. Those few minutes had to add up.