- What not to cut
- Find what’s core
- Kill lame features
- What if the user…?
- But our customers want it
- Features that trigger errors
- Errors
- When features don’t matter
- Will it hurt?
- Prioritizing features
- Load
- Decisions
- Distractions
- Smart defaults
- Options and preferences
- When one option is too many
- Visual clutter
- Removing words
- Simplifying sentences
- Conversation
- Cutting time
- Removing too much
- You can do it
- Focus
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Conversation
An interaction is a dialogue between the user and the device. Listen to a conversation between two people and you’ll notice something interesting that you can apply to the way that people interact with devices, software, and services: People adjust conversations to suit the situation.
When people are under time pressure, then both sides in the conversation recognize this and tend to cut things down to the bare minimum. Less pressure, and the conversation tends to be more detailed and open. Each side is looking out for the other, making sure they don’t waste time.
When we deal with computers, they often have no way of telling the time pressure we’re under. As a result, many interactions seem detailed, complex, and tedious: You want to make the booking online, and the computer is trying to get you to sign up to the loyalty scheme, too. What seems simple to a group of designers sitting around a table feels complex and frustrating to a user under time pressure.
Listen carefully to conversations between people, and you’ll notice that things are a little more complicated than just taking time pressure into account. They also account for the risk (and consequences) of error. If one person thinks the other will run into problems, they’ll slow things down—even if the other person is in a hurry. Often, they’ll flag this to the other person (“I know you’re in a hurry, but this is important…”).
Finally, you’ll notice that sometimes people skip details because they know (or assume) that the other person knows them already. Someone giving directions to a local may say: “The book store is right next to Starbucks,” whereas they’d give turn-by-turn directions to a stranger.
Those three factors—time pressure, risk and consequences of error, and shared knowledge—are all factors that people use to simplify conversations. When you’re designing an interaction, you can use those things to tune a conversation to feel simple according to your specific user’s circumstances.
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