In my first post, I said that design does not have to be a physical product. Yet, all of my posts so far have been about that. I wanted to use this post as an opportunity to talk about something different yet present in our everyday lives: Digital Design.
Technology has become part of our lives. Every day we use our phones or laptops to communicate, work or simply as entertainment. But, how do we communicate with technology itself? The way information is presented on a screen and how we interact with it is extremely important.
It can be the small details on a website that make design simple. For example, when introducing your credit card number online, a few pages have auto-spacing, so that every four digits a space is automatically introduced (XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX) instead of having all the digits next to each other (XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX). This allows the user to see clearer the information and check it.
Not long ago I had an issue when buying a shirt online. When I tried to check out, the website displayed an error message saying there was a problem with my shipping details. However, it did not specify where or what the problem was: if it was the address, the post code, if I had too many characters, whether I had invalid characters… Nothing. I checked the details and everything was right. Took me a few minutes of trial and error until I realized it was a slash (/) that was causing the problem. How difficult would it have been to specify what the error was from the beginning?
A user should never feel overwhelmed by a design, by neither physical or digital. If I can’t go to your app and in five seconds know what to do, you’ve got a problem.
In 2018, Snapchat did a major update on its app, including new features and changing the way of sharing the images. However, the new design did not go well as users complained it was confusing and harder to use. This made millions of users stop using the app, which lead to a one billion dollars loss in the company’s market value.
And how do we interact with this technology? Clicking, tapping, scrolling… you can do so much using just your fingers: pinch to zoom on videos, swipe up from the bottom to exit an app, swipe up from the bottom and hold to multitask… They all seem so obvious now, but these gestures didn’t exist a few years ago.
Interaction design, at its core, is a psychological exercise. If you’ve ever been scrolling through your Twitter feed or your Instagram feed, you’ve notice you don’t hit the bottom. That’s a relatively new feature, called bottomless scroll.
“I feel like I have to forever atone for. When I was thinking about infinite scroll, like the thought was, I as a designer, have failed if I ask the user to make a choice they don’t care about. So, scrolling already means “I haven’t seen what I want, show me more.” So why bother having little button at the bottom that you click to show more? I as an individual designer doing human-computer interaction will happily make an infinite scroll. But if I’m thinking at this higher level, I would’ve known that that would’ve removed the stopping cues, just like when I’m drinking a glass of wine. I stop drinking when I finish my class and I think do I want more. Here we’re not giving people the stopping cue. And so, it’s literally wasted hundreds of millions of human hours. It’s no longer enough as a designer to think about the constraints of just one individual using my product. Instead, we have to think the fractal version up to technology-society interaction.”