One of the most important books about user experience is Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. First published in 2000, it defined an approach to usability testing when the web was in the ascendancy. It was a breezy but powerful introduction to the importance of usability, and how to achieve it.
I first became aware of it when I started my first proper job — with the University of St Andrews web team — and my colleagues enthusiastically shared the book with me. It sparked a deep interest in user experience that has shaped my thinking throughout my career.
It has influenced many others as well. The importance of usability now feels like a mainstream idea. It is utterly uncontroversial to suggest that usability is one of the most important metrics of success.
The central premise of the book is that users come to a system to complete a task. The system’s job is to help the user carry out that task as easily as possible — without making them think.
Simplicity can become malicious
“Don’t make me think” is one of those rules that has become so well known that its meaning has become twisted over time.
Often this phrase is invoked to justify removing choices from users, or hiding information from them. This is malicious simplicity. Taken to its extreme, I view it as a deceptive pattern.
Of course our systems should be easy to use. But we must also give users the opportunity to learn, explore and understand more.
Most human-centred disciplines support self-actualisation
Most human-centred disciplines aim support people to self-actualise — to grow themselves to help them find their own answers in order to reach their full potential.
For example, person-centred therapy is aimed at helping people understand themselves and find their own solutions to their problems.
Similarly, student-centred learning is about developing the autonomy of learners to help them become responsible for their own education and set them up for lifelong learning.
Patient-centred care places patients’ values, needs and preferences at the forefront of their healthcare.
In person-centred coaching, the role of the coach is ask the right questions to support the coachee to reach their own decisions.
Authority figures should not be in the centre
Those approaches flipped traditional approaches that positioned an authority figure as being in the centre.
Person-centred therapists should not be telling their client what they should do or think.
Student-centred teachers wouldn’t instruct their students what or how to learn.
Patient-centred clinicians aim to “empower patients to become active participants in their care”.
Coaches that don’t support their coachee to find their own answers are merely instructors.
User experience instead tends to remove options from people
Somehow, in digital user experience, we have ended up using the term “human centred” to do the opposite. In the name of simplicity, we assert that our systems know best. We remove options. We decide which button is the “primary action” that we give the bold background colour that lures people to “click here”.
This places our systems, our institutions and ultimately ourselves at the centre — while calling it user-centred.
I have noted before how the double diamond design process literally visualises how — amid all the divergence and convergence — designers can give themselves ultimate control at the beginning, middle and end.
Simplicity is often interpreted as optimising for the happy path alone
Yes, in theory, we carry out user research to identify what users need. User research usually reveals that humans have disparate, messy, complex sets of needs and aims.
Yet, instead of figuring out how to support this rich tapestry of humanity, most product teams attempt to interpret user research to help them identify an elusive happy path they can optimise around. Once a happy path is determined, everything else is deemed an “edge case”, and deprioritised.
This happy path becomes our authority view on what users need, what should be usable and what does not need to be easy to use. We impose a top-down view of what people should be able to do in our system. From here, it is impossible to be truly human-centred.
Optimising for learnability can empower our users to grow
Of course, we must not put unnecessary barriers in people’s way when they are using a system. But we ought to respect that people are often more intelligent than we give them credit for, and they have agency.
Our job should therefore be to empower our users to think, learn and grow.
As Jorge Arango said in his information architecture principles:
Mental models grow by accretion. There are no ‘intuitive’ information structures, only learnable ones; our job is building scaffoldings that allow people to find their way to knowledge.
Similarly, there is not really such a thing as an intuitive user interface. But we definitely want our user interfaces to be learnable.
We should support users to ask better questions
Users navigate information systems by “berrypicking”. According to Marcia Bates’ influential 1989 paper:
In real-life searches in manual sources, end users may begin with just one feature of a broader topic, or just one relevant reference, and move through a variety of sources. Each new piece of information they encounter gives them new ideas and directions to follow and, consequently, a new conception of the query. At each stage they are not just modifying the search terms used in order to get a better match for a single query. Rather the query itself (as well as the search terms used) is continually shifting, in part or whole. This type of search is here called an evolving search.
In other words, we cannot just expect to serve people the “right” answer at the first attempt. Instead, we need to support users to learn how to ask better questions. We should place berries for our users to pick.
Progressive disclosure can create a learnable information environment
I am not proposing that we suddenly cram our user interfaces with unnecessary features and overwhelming amounts of information.
Rather, we should use progressive disclosure to hint about new possibilities. Here, the initial steps in a flow remain simple and focused on primary tasks. But crucially, they still provide a route into more advanced functionality and more sophisticated information.
Less by itself is not always more
Many digital services aim to reduce friction. They do so by removing anything that might distract users from the happy path.
“Less is more” is a common refrain. The phrase was popularised by the modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. But it turns out he lifted it from an 1855 poem about a painter, which advocates that less technical excellence can result in more emotional impact. This is a different meaning to the one we usually ascribe to it.
Dieter Rams included among his ten principles for good design: “Good design is as little design as possible”. However, this is tempered by the inclusion of other principles that qualify it, such as: “Good design makes a product understandable”.
Digital services have tended to favour the “less is more” approach. They aim to make things as easy for the user as possible by removing as much as possible.
Minimalist public service interfaces obfuscate important information
The minimalist aesthetic adopted by the UK Government Digital Service around 15 years ago was rightly lauded and widely copied. At the time, it was a necessary reaction to a legacy of expensively-built, disjointed public services with cluttered user interfaces.
But there is an argument that this minimalism has been taken too far. It now serves to obfuscate details that the public deserve to know. In other words, making our services intuitive often comes at the expense of making our services (and the inner workings of government) learnable.
This imbues our services with a superficial, transactional feel. We run digital services as if the public is only there to fill in the forms we ask them to fill in.
We should not merely aim to get users in and out of our interfaces as quickly as possible. We have an opportunity to build a more meaningful relationship with the public. Each interaction should be an opportunity for people to build knowledge, and for public services to earn trust.
We need to show our seams
Richard Pope, one of the most influential figures of the early days of the Government Digital Service, now advocates against “seamless design”. He says that instead we should design the seams:
…as modern design practice spread across government, the simplicity principle took on a life of its own. The idea that people should not have to understand the rules and the structure of government seemed to morph into an assertion that the workings of government should be obfuscated…
Understanding the way things are is a precondition for being able to change them. Democracy, it has been said, is ‘government by explanation’.
This is sort of transparency is going to become more crucial as agentic interfaces become increasingly common:
The more automated the experience, the more important this kind of transparency becomes. Hiding the seams might seem like the right choice in the name of convenience, but in the context of user agency and rights, it can contribute to eroding trust.
Improving society by treating users with respect
Taken too far, the idea of not making people think is actually rather dangerous. In the quest to simplify, we risk infantilising our users. It reminds me of a warning made by Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman: “If you treat people like idiots, they behave like idiots.”
We should see our users as intelligent and capable people. If we treat them with respect, they will behave with respect. The rewards for our society could be great. The roadmap could look like this:
Digital public services should empower users to learn more about how public services work. Who delivers them. Who is responsible when something goes wrong.
From there, users can begin to learn more about how government works. The legislation behind them. The policies that led to them. The ministers accountable for them. The consultations that gives people a say in how they can change.
This could increase trust, improve accountability, and help people become more active participants in their democracy.
As it stands, most digital public services sweep all of this information under the rug. We are saying to our people: Don’t worry your little mind about all that stuff.
This is the digital equivalent of the Son of Man. We stand there as the civil service wearing our bowler hat, but our true self is obscured.
The information might be published somewhere, but it is normally far away from the service itself. This makes it relatively difficult to access and understand in comparison to the “apply now” happy path.
We do this because we tell ourselves: “users shouldn’t need to know that information”. Maybe, in a perfect world, they ought not need to know that. But in a democracy, if people do need to know something, we ought to help them learn about it.
Likes