Law of Diminishing Returns and Other Observations in Interface Design

Oh, to design an interface and be a business at the same time. Often these goals tug in opposition, but it doesn't have to be that way. A little common sense sprinkled along the way helps.

Process
I try to keep interfaces minimal (not always successfully). I have had the experience of creating successful minimal(ish) interfaces and unsuccessful ones. I have had the experience of creating successful complex interfaces and unsuccessful ones.

I try to keep control surfaces and visual distractions to an almost extreme minimum in the concept stage, since I know that more will be added as the design and production process progresses. I also tend to like threes.

I like to start with a website interface that contains minimal branding and three buttons. If that would be the production interface, to which three places on the site do we most want to drive traffic? This gives me and the client a starting point where we can identify the most important user behaviors we want to build and reinforce.

If it's most important to drive a visitor to become a member of the website, then give them a little taste of the content and provide a very obvious facility to sign up. All roads should lead to the sign up. If we really want users to browse a music catalog, provide a starting point and some suggestions up front, and draw them in. Don't cloud the purpose of the site with lots of other "added value" that the business has tacked on. If the goal is to make visitors into users, draw them in with your most desirable content. Everything else is secondary.

That New Car Smell

You'll see this process play out over and over. A new website or service launches and the interface is new and shiny and uncluttered. You don't feel attacked when you arrive, you don't feel like just another wallet in the WalMart. You feel like you've arrived at an exclusive destination brimming with possibility. Hopefully the interface also guides you to the content or product or service offered on the site and thus changes you from a visitor to a member.

Then, months pass and the community builds. Articles are written about this new product or service, and the little startup has to kick in phase two of its plan whereby they start "adding value" for users by pitching them more tacked-on sticky products and services. These elements need a home on the site in the interface, and with time the original destination spot turns into the same cruddy congested heap of confusion as every other middle-aged site out there.

Luckily your early adopters have been transformed into power users and are able to adapt to the changing atmosphere since they have already found a comfort level with the value proposition of the site. You risk frustrating the growing community, however, as you try to improve poor elements and add more options to the site's available activities. Facebook has experienced this effect publicly several times in its short history.

The community can rebel against things they have become accustomed to if the change is not as good or better than the previous version at the same or less cost. Cost, in this case, can refer to time, money, or other unit of value.

Rules, or at Least, Observations

Let's take a look at a few observations from my time as a designer. Some of what I've learned can be summed up into categories:

1. Training - The first, second, third, or more times that someone uses an interface is a learning experience for them. They are having to adjust their initial expectations to the reality of the way the interface works. So be considerate to your users. The more the interface works the way they initially expect it to, the more positive their initial experience will feel.
   
   
2. Busyness - More options (links, pictures, icons, buttons, feeds) is more information for a user to have to sort through visually in order to make sense of the interface and interact with it. I have discussed one aspect of this concept before in a post about content suffocation through online advertising.
   
   
3. Impatience - People don't waste time on interfaces or content they don't "get." This means an interface doesn't have a lot of time with a new or returning visitor to supply them the content or navigational path to the content they are interested in.
   
   
4. Rewards - People don't continue to use or come back to an interface if they don't feel they've been appropriately rewarded for the effort they've put into it. A fantastic, clean, and easy to use interface around lame content will drive users away. And stellar content within a poor interface makes a visitor less likely to come back. Though in my observations, a visitor who feels highly rewarded by the content, even in the face of a poorly designed interface, will be more likely to just bear with it and return. Simple Chart Time!™
   
   In the chart below, blue represents the potential that a visitor will return to a website, or any interface. Darker blue is better.
   
   
   
   This chart illustrates the observation that even a poor interface can mask its deficiencies with stellar content. Users are more forgiving of a poor interface than they are of poor content. This, I believe, is because users will adapt to poor design if the reward is great content.
   
   
   

   Case Study
   A related case study is the Urban Baby (UB) message boards. For the longest time, the boards were very poorly designed, requiring users to laboriously click on every post to view it rather than skimming the entire thread. This defective design led users to place almost all their posts in the subject header in order to make the boards just bearable enough to use. The draw of the community, however, was that it was full of anonymous, acerbic, bitchy, funny, scared, and helpful women who all had children. And they interacted on those boards with reckless abandon (often obsessively so) and forgave it its technical and interface deficiencies. The draw of the content was enough to build a very valuable and loyal community.
   
   Flash forward to the UB community being sold to iVillage or something, and the software running the message boards was upgraded with some good enhancements, and some boneheaded ones. Separately, a husband and wife couple quickly built a clone of the original poor UB interface and invited everyone at the new UB to come and bring their discussions to the UB clone, YouBe Mom (homonym pun intended).
   
   In an odd perversion of logic, the vocal, fun, angry, helpful, nasty, hilarious contributors to the UB community migrated to the YouBe boards, where they felt most comfortable. Even in the presence of a better interface, the community chose to go with the crappier interface and now YouBe is the place to go for answers or berating. Which brings us to the next observation...
   

   
   
   
   
5. Comfort - The usable attractiveness of an interface is directly related to the perceived and experienced comfort with using it. Put another way, no matter how pretty an interface is, it will be perceived as a failure if it doesn't behave the way it seems that it should.
   
   People put a lot of value in their perceptions, and are very hard on inanimate objects like websites and electronics if their perceptions are not appropriately changed for the better or sufficiently supported.
   
6. Work - A click and a page load are perceived as kinds of "work" to a user, though a page load is perceived as more work than just a click.
   
   Consider the following scenario, where a user who is visiting a site and skimming a large content pool on the homepage clicks a photo to see the enlarged version. In one scenario, the photo pops up enlarged and on top of all the other content. Everything else on the page darkens a bit to indicate that the interface's control surfaces are temporarily unavailable, and the photo is the focal point of the page. The user has one option to close out the photo and that is to click the only thing that looks like a control, the X box at the top right of the photo.
   
   The user does this action with one click and is quickly presented again with the content they had been browsing. We can call this kind of work the "cost" of the click. In this case the cost of the click on the photo was low because:
   
   
   
   1. There was very little additional learning necessary to absorb the desired content on the page;
   2. Very little time was spent waiting for the desired content to appear;
   3. Very little visual distraction for the user to visually sort through in order to find the content they had expected to get.
   In another scenario, the user clicks a photo, and is taken to a new page, waits 10 seconds while all the extraneous ads and content feeds load, and is assailed by a new set of visual distractions screaming to be clicked. The user has now been presented with many tens or even hundreds of new options to digest visually, adding "stress" to the browsing experience. Now the user is unsure if they should now click the "home" button or the "back" button in the interface, or the "back" button on the browser which is sometimes flakey, with its ominous "are you sure you want to resend this form?" messages. Or maybe they are easily distracted by something else on the page, which is a potential crap shoot... is this an ad or another piece of content on the site?
   
   Worse than this scenario is the one where a click on the original picture takes the user to a different site entirely, where the photo may or may not even be present, and may or may not be larger to their satisfaction. Either of these last two situations is confusing and frustrating to a fast-moving web surfer. These situations make browsing feel like work, rather than enjoyable, leisurely consumption. These situations have a higher "cost" to the user because they spend more time learning the interface, more time waiting, and are more visually distracted.
   
   So, consider how much work you are making your user do while interacting with your content. Is a click necessary? Will a rollover do? Is it obvious that the content will do something if one rolls over it? Will the rollover be confusing or frustrating if it starts to get in the way of just moving around the page? Will the click be worth it? Will the user feel like the value of the click was high while the cost was low?
   
   

To conclude for now, I just ask that interface designers (pro or not) use some common sense when developing new interfaces. Think about it as if you had never encountered this interface before and don't have time to get involved. Will the interface attract you in? Will the interface reward you with a comfortable experience and good content?

Perhaps I will cover more observations for interface design in a future post.