Guns Are In
9 hours ago
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Confusion as a design feature
Ever wonder why Facebook redesigns its interface every six months, often adding more complexity?
Deliberate confusion can be a positive design strategy. We've been thinking of this for several years now, tipped off by the annoyingly elaborate user interfaces at weather web sites (where you must click through three pages of busy links to find a simple forecast). Today's most promising portals often require users to work hard to understand how to use them. Twitter? Yes, it's only 140 characters, but try explaining retweets and @'s and DM's and search and lists to a new user, and you realize the microblogging service has cleverly ensnared you in a complex learning curve. Facebook is even more confusing, yet consumers have responded in droves. The SharesPost marketplace, which places valuations on startup firms, recently suggested ubersillynetwork Facebook is now worth $11.5 billion due to its vast lattice of people poking and tossing Farmville updates at each other.
Part of this is psychological -- humans feel rewarded when they solve puzzles or score points (um, Twitter follower counts anyone?) -- and so complexity in design can make each experience feel novel again; the charm of Facebook, after all, is never knowing exactly what the hell you'll find when you show up. Another rationale for complex designs is business strategy; if you force a user to spend more time on pages solving the puzzling interface, like on a weather site, you can sell more ad inventory. But the deepest driver of design confusion is human desire to make anything complex. We want more information built into human conversations or our physical space, which is why when you log in to work on a Monday morning you must now check work email, voicemail, Gmail, Google chat, cell phone messages, Facebook, Twitter, the physical mail and the fax just to make sure you didn't miss anything.
Confusing interfaces might drive the great visual thinker Edward Tufte nuts (he called superfluous design "chart junk"). Yet as the world of knowledge evolves, we hunger for more nuance to allow us to dive deeper into information. It will only get worse as data begins flowing into the real view of the surroundings around us. See the video above, a graduate thesis project by Julia Yu Tsao at Art Center College of Design.
Chart junk, we may hate you, but you are here to stay.
Inspired by Len Kendall.
6 comments:
Hey Ben, this might keep the experience fresh for existing users but what about reaching out to those not yet using these tools or services? The more complexity, the greater the barriers to entry. As things gets harder, they also need to get easier.
The iPhone (cliche alert) is a pretty good example of this - it does nothing a Nokia can't do but by focusing on usability and hiding the more complex operations beneath the simple, hygiene functions it has managed to appeal to a mass market (even if some aren't yet willing to increase their payment plans)
Simon, thanks.
I think the trick is to have a sliding scale of complexity in which the difficulty ahead is outweighed by the curiosity of moving ahead. Twitter is a good example -- it's layered, and you can start simply and unlock the more nuanced levels as you go.
This is very common dynamic beyond technology. Religion, politics, secret societies and school educational hierarchies all have rising levels of complexity that compel you to advance as you move deeper into the organization. At each stage, there are new nuances and rewards that make one hunger for more.
It's all a bit of a loyalty scheme, really. No one in his or her right mind would pay $200,000 for a piece of paper -- unless it is a college degree at the pinnacle of a long laborious climb of complexity that made the final award feel more worthwhile than it is.
So back to UX -- a touch of complexity could be useful in both building audiences and loyalty, if you scale it just right.
You're right. From point zero to point infinity, most entities do become increasingly complex because if it goes in reverse it will bore us. Despite the trend towards minimalism, when it comes to modern technology we always add more functionality not less.
I like your analogy of points and for me, this situation is similar to playing through an RPG (nerd alert!) As the game moves forward, your character develops more nuances and abilities. It is your motivation to continue playing. Becoming powerful and simple just doesn't have the same appeal.
Whenever I design something, I have never said, "How can I make this harder to use?" The goal is to make people feel as comfortable as possible when using your application, website, or whatever you are designing. I understand that there is always a learning curve with using something new, but you should never design something with the hopes of confusing your users.
Ben,
I'm having difficulty following your logic that Facebook has grown in part because of its complex UX. I don't see the relationship. Facebook has many inherent advantages over other networks that make it popular and part of its competitie advantage is a better UX (compared to MySpace, for example). The UX has become complex because Facebook has many layers - and perhaps the complexity (or better put, flexibility) does help the service's popularity. In fact, with a more consistent UX, we may have seen even greater growth).
I wonder if you've seen heatmaps or other data (not specific to Facebook perhaps) that support the premise that confusion as a design feature could be a viable strategy. It's an interesting suggestion - but I can't think of a single example in the marketplace that supports it (your Twitter example doesn't work - at least for me. Twitter's design is simple but how certain Twitter features are used may be complex. There's a difference between confusing UX and confusing features - although perhaps at some point, those differences converge).
Even more - I think that creating a confusing UX through software "features" can be dangerous for companies (especially startups).
Ross
Ross and Shawn,
I understand from a micro viewpoint that clean UX is desirable. However, I suggest there is evidence that people hunger for a level of complexity. Facebook is a good example; while you are familiar with it, I invite you to chat with a user who just signed up and witness their befuddlement over the many ways to send messages to other people.
Complexity in small doses can create back-end loyalty and inspire front-end acquisition. This is why every web site and blog in the world has a different design (if simple UX is important, why don't we have one web layout standard for each basic type of web usage)? The iPhone is my favorite current example of unnecessarily complex design -- complexity known as "apps" -- that has taken a simple glass pad and added infinite varieties of tangled pathways to find weather and sports scores. The fact that consumers are adding apps like ornamentation to their clean iPhones shows we really do want to make our own user experiences complex, because the novelty, puzzlement, and problem solving are rewarding.
I like a clean logo or web form as much as the next guy. Yet I suggest if you think one level up, a touch of complexity can inspire consumers to engage with you in a way that white space or intuitive clicks cannot. It's not enough in design to help people solve a problem; you can also try designing the puzzle to solve in the first place.
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