1 post filed under ux
It’s the little things
If we’re designing systems we want people to love it could be more important to think about the little things that will get on their nerves than the cool things that excite them.
When you spend a lot of time with someone it’s the little things that piss you off most. The way they leave their shoes in the hall, the way they make a funny little noise when they eat, the way they… grr.
It’s especially true of those you love. Love amplifies these problems.
In isolation those things are pathetic but it’s the combination of them that add up to something far greater than a big but forgivable misdemeanor.
A plane crash is very rarely due to something catastrophic happening to the plane. It’s most often due to a sequence of very small, otherwise insignificant events.
The same thing applies to digital product design. It’s the little things that wind people up the most. Simple little information architecture or interaction design oversights or mistakes that are almost right but you know, somehow not right. Not enough to complain about on their own but combined with all the other little idiosyncrasies of the system conspire to make the experience of using a system a rubbish one.
It’s these things that often get missed - even during extensive user testing. Lots of effort is put in to designing page layouts, navigation, and major features but very little effort is put into designing the things that really matter to people. Crisis points. System messages, error reporting and mundane processes are often left to developers to implement without even asking for a designer’s input and it should almost be the other way round. It might be worth working to identify these things first and designing outward from that.
Photo by paloaltosoftware on flickr.
