Needs from general expectations

Even if our body and brain are capable of doing many activities, it does not mean all of them are convenient, comfortable, or pleasing for us. Regardless of the specific type of product, users have general expectations when using them. Failing to meet those expectations when designing our products will negatively affect the resulting user experience. Users will be confused to see a product not behaving as they expected, which is breaking the principle of least astonishment.

Each interaction the user performs with a product requires some mental effort. This mental effort is often referred as the cognitive load. For example, a navigation app can ask your destination during your vacation trip in different ways. It would be easier for you to indicate the destination by the name of the place (Eiffel Tower) rather than the specific address (Champ de Mars, 5 Avenue Anatole France, Paris) or using the exact coordinates (48° 51' 29.6" N, 2° 17' 40.2" E). The cognitive load could be reduced further if the app were capable of ignoring potential typos, allowed voice input to just say the destination, or could suggest the destination in the first place, anticipating your needs.

A well-designed product should demand as little effort from the user as possible, reducing the points of friction where the user has to stop and think, reorient, or gets confused. Reducing friction often requires moving most of the complexities--such as translating the name of a place into coordinates--from the user into the computer.

The effort to use a product can be divided in two stages--understanding how the product works and operating it. Design considerations are key in both stages.

Explaining how a product works should be the job of the product itself. Designing a product that is obvious to use is essential since no one is going to read the instructions.

Donald Norman described the elements that communicate the possible actions of an object as affordances. Door handles are a classic example of affordances. They are placed at the hand reach and shaped to be manipulated by our hands. They are the way for the door to tell us how to open it. When affordances are applied wrong, they result in confusions about the possible actions. As a result, people find themselves pushing a door that should be pulled instead--those cases of badly designed doors are known as Norman Doors, named after the well-known designer.

Affordances can use different properties to suggest their intended use such as shape, position, color, or movement. That helps users to interpret their meaning, but their meaning is also reinforced by previous experiences. The direct or indirect associations with previous uses of similar cases helps with the learning of new ones. Products do not exist in isolation, and the use of existing products will influence our expectations of new ones.

The digital world also has its own conventions that millions of previous products have help to establish. For example, many users will identify an "X" icon to represent an action to close or discard.

Metaphors can help users connect the dots between a known concept and an old one. The digital concepts of desktop, folder, or windows rely on some of the aspects of their physical counterparts. A shopping app can use a shopping cart icon to signal the place where your selected products are.

However, we need to be careful and avoid mimicking the original concepts. It won't make much sense to use a 3D recreation of the shopping cart where you need to make the space to place each product in the cart as you would in a real supermarket. Avoid transferring the limitations of the physical world into the digital one. The digital space is better suited for many actions such as finding the products you bought last week. You don't want to follow a metaphor so literally that it limits the possible solutions.

Design guidelines capture important conventions to consider when you design for a specific platform, organization, or family of products. In this way, your solutions can reuse concepts that are familiar to users in the exact way they are used to interacting.

Breaking conventions may be needed at times, but it should be done only for a really good reason. We need to make sure that the benefit provided to our users is much greater than the potentially negative effects of possible confusions.

Social and cultural conventions also have their influence on what people expect from products. A hand gesture that means approval in one culture can be an offensive gesture in another, when found as an icon. Similarly, languages bring their own conventions. Concepts associated with directionality will be represented differently depending on the language direction. For example, a forward, next, or reproduce action in English--a left-to-right language--can be represented with a triangle or arrow pointing to the right, whereas it needs to point to the left for languages, such as Arabic, which are written in the opposite direction to keep its forward action.

In addition to understanding how products work, we want them to require minimal effort when they are used. The following principles contribute to a positive user experience for all kinds of products:

• Require minimal intervention: The fewer steps we need to solve a problem, the better. Our designs should avoid unnecessary steps for people when using our product. This can be supported by the following different strategies:
  • Allowing flexible input: Information can be provided in many different ways. Some people use spaces, parenthesis, or dashes to group telephone numbers or monetary amounts in a transaction, others do not. Instead of imposing a specific format to meet the needs of the technology, allow your users to provide the information in all the ways that are most natural to them.
  • Providing smart defaults: When asking users for information, we should avoid open questions, and provide options instead. Recognition is a much simpler mental process than recall from memory. Thus, anticipating possible answers will save time for the user. If any of those options is likely to be what the user needs, setting it as the default would save time in most cases. For example, navigation apps can assume that your current position is your starting point. That is not always the case, and you may need to change those defaults, but overall it will avoid an additional step to go through most of the time.
  • Support direct manipulation: For a long time, the mouse was one of the most common input devices. Users moved the mouse on their desk to move the cursor on their screens in order to act on a digital object. The arrival of touch screens allowed users to tap the element directly, reducing indirection steps. Indirection steps require users to make mental efforts to go through them. For example, it is simpler to use a hand gesture to zoom a picture than accessing a separate zoom menu that is disconnected from the picture it affects.

• Inform users in relevant terms: Users want to know what is happening when using a product, but this feedback needs to be meaningful. Some aspects to consider:
  • Make users feel in control: Regardless of the level of automation a product can provide, users want to feel in control. A user trying to send a message to a friend will be more comfortable when they are sure that the message is sent and has reached the destination. This confirmation can happen in many different ways, from a simple visual cue to a more explicit feedback text. Choosing the right level of prominence for feedback according to each case will allow users to feel in control without the system being perceived as annoying.
  • Explain by comparing: Information is better understood when compared. During a car trip, knowing the distance to the destination can be useful. This distance is useful in your favorite distance unit--miles or kilometers--but it is even more useful when presented compared with the car speed as the time to reach your destination. Given a piece of information, it is important to identify the purpose it serves for our users in order to decide which is the most meaningful representation for it.
  • Communicate in the user's terms: The closest we represent concepts to the way users understand them--what is referred to as the user mental model, the more fluent their interaction will be. We should avoid messages that refer to internal aspects of the system or using technical jargon. A user looking for a taxi will be confused to hear that no records were found. It is easier to understand instead that no taxis are available in the nearby area.
• Don't waste the user's time: Time is a precious resource. When helping users to solve their problems, they will always appreciate solutions that require them to use as little time as possible. These are some relevant concepts to be considered:
  • Keep tools at hand: Providing the tools people need where they need them helps the user to avoid spending time looking for them elsewhere. After you call a telephone number that is not in your contacts, it is convenient to have an option to save it as a new contact. Identifying the next logical step and looking for ways to facilitate it will help you come up with these convenient shortcuts. Separating actions (the operations you commonly use to manipulate information) from configuration (the preferences you have and rarely change) also helps users to have the most needed options at hand.
  • Performance: Nobody likes waiting. We should aim for our products to respond to user interactions as fast as possible. Anticipating the user next steps, caching, and other technical optimizations can help you to keep the user interactions under a reasonable response time. Regardless of the real time it takes to complete an action, even more important is how long the wait is perceived by the user. The perceived performance can be improved in many ways. Using placeholders similar to the content that will be loaded or communicating long waits with an adequate loading indicator will help the wait to feel shorter than what it actually is.
  • Reduce interruptions: Asking the user to stop what they are doing will force them to switch context and break their flow of actions. Modal dialog and alerts can become annoying. We should aim to communicate relevant circumstances, such as the username proposed not being available or the internet connection being lost in a non-blocking way. Make your users aware of the information, but let them to decide when to act about it. Similarly, when waiting for some information, keeping the blocked elements to a minimum will help to reduce interruptions. For example, on a map application, it is convenient to make it still possible to manipulate the map--moving or zooming it--while the map tiles are being loaded with images.

• Avoid mistakes: People feel bad when they make mistakes. Your products should not harm the user or make them feel stupid. These are some possible approaches:
  • Make it impossible to use it incorrectly: Ideally, a product should be designed in such a way that it is impossible to use it improperly. For example, using the appropriate controls, you can communicate that the range of dates for your hotel reservation can only include future dates. Preventing accidental side-effects and confusing errors contributes to creating an environment of safe exploration, where users are welcome to move around and find their way without the fear of messing things up.
  • Avoid dead-ends: Users should always have a way forward to achieve their goals. We should avoid putting them in situations where there is no apparent way to move forward. For example, if there are no results for a user search, some alternatives can be suggested based on similar results--similarly spelled results--or you can provide alternative ways to find content--such as browsing by categories.
  • Alleviate the unavoidable: In cases where mistakes are unavoidable, our product can consider ways to correct or alleviate those issues. For example, a network failure can be fixed by retrying the operation automatically without bothering the user. If the connection remains unavailable for a longer time, informing about the issue and keeping the pending changes locally to be saved later would help. In any case, never blame the user. Avoid messages that can be understood as an error being the fault of the user, since users only do what the system lets them do.

There are many general design and usability heuristics and pattern libraries and guidelines. These provide recommendations on important aspects to consider when designing positive interactions for all kinds of products. Following them will help your products to be more usable. However, these are not enough to guarantee that your solution will satisfy all the needs of your users.