Dec
15
Your App’s User Interface is Like Eating
Who goes to a restaurant and says, “Just give me something to stop my hunger?” Eating out is more about the experience than it is about the food. Hell, why else would my sister pay $46 for 12 cupcakes? And they were the biggest hit at my wife’s baby shower. “They’re gourmet!” she explains.
With software, User Experience is king, especially in the mobile space. Look how users use their phones. They pull it out of their pocket, do something real quick and then quickly put it away. In a mobile setting, people’s patience is at a record low. Most of the possible actions they may do are so trivial that it’s not worth their time to endure a slow connection or scroll through a bunch of garbage. They’re not writing a paper or conducting research. They’re just looking up sport scores or just checking up on their friends. It their app doesn’t perform well, not a whole lot is lost by just giving up.
Here are a few philosophies we try to adhere to when building our mobile apps.
- Trim the Fat
Show the user just enough information to get the job done and nothing extra. In a mobile setting, less is more. If they needed the whole story, they wouldn’t be using a three inch screen. Everything else is clutter. - The 80/20 Rule
Aim to serve 80% of your customers very well and ignore the cries of the other 20%. “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody” – Bill Cosby. We’ve gotten multiple requests to support scanning lotto tickets. Suddenly our elevator pitch would become unnecessarily complex. - Responsiveness
Every millisecond counts. It’s amazing what small amounts of lag can do towards killing the User Experience. Whether it’s lag in a network response or lag in an animation, immediate feedback keeps the user engaged and feeling in control. After scanning a barcode, ShopSavvy will start showing you prices before it’s finished searching for them. This approach prevents us from having to disengage the user for 10 seconds with a “Please Wait” screen. As it turns out, users don’t mind watching the price gradually drop over a few seconds. It’s even kind of fun. - Fun is a Requirement
Users’ attention spans are at an all time low on a mobile device. But I’ve seen people flick their home screen from left to right for minutes at a time. This accomplishes nothing! Why would someone choose to do that instead of interacting with some useful apps? Same reason eating out isn’t about feeding your body. It’s about how it’s done and why is it special. Users have told us that they can’t help but scan every barcode in sight. Scanning a barcode and hearing that beep is surprisingly gratifying. The “fun” aspect encourages continued-use.
The next time you select a restaurant, try to decipher why you chose it. Does it have the cheapest food? Probably not. Is the food the best tasting? Maybe, but I doubt that’s the whole story. Sprinkles Cupcakes puts a 30 cent cupcake on a fancy doily and calls it gourmet, “that’ll be $3.25.” You’re not paying for food, you’re paying for the experience. The best way to add value to your mobile app is by enhancing the User Experience. Write Gourmet Software (TM).
Kudos for talking about UX here. However, from this designer’s perspective, this commentary is an interesting analogy but doesn’t quite capture the complexity and subtleties of why UX and interaction design are important. Far more than the material and gastronomic but rather empty satisfactions of cupcake apps, getting the design right often is the difference between success and failure, not between “eh” and a sugar rush.
The example of fun doesn’t really enlighten the reader with what fun should be about, plus, the characteristic that is more general and important is delight. An app might be engaging and entertaining without being what someone would call “fun”. This element of delight is also far more crucial than unnecessary desire fulfillment. While some people may indeed just need to flick their home screen, many more of us are interested in the what and how of the satisfaction we get with the actual experience.
In addition, you have to be careful with guidelines such as “trim the fat”. I’ve seen highly efficient and minimalistic apps that work perfectly and are nearly unusable. Why? Turns out that the wheels of interaction are greased by some amount of seeming excess and redundancy. Designing that correctly is crucial though. You are right that there is a threshold that is reached quickly beyond which users will regard the app as bloated and time-wasting.
And there are several more very key components of good UX design that aren’t covered here.
Enough for the soapbox. Your app is a sign of things to come: When connecting to the internet means more than starting a search with thousands and thousands of results and instead becomes applications that use built-in intelligence and knowledge to find the information and do the things we really want. Best of luck.
Comment by Phillip Hunter — December 15, 2008 @ 9:53 am
Hey, you’re an UI Guru and an Aggie? ROCK! You and I would have a lot to talk about if we ever crossed paths.
Glad you liked the post.
Comment by rbarnes — December 17, 2008 @ 12:26 pm