Interfaces are conversations

Personas. Empathy maps. User stories. Diary studies. Mental models. Hick's law.

Safe to say, there's a lot of jargon in user experience design.

I transitioned into UX from an academic lab. In that job, I had to define my reasoning for each experiment in plain language: What is my question, and is it testable? This resulted in projects with clear scope and measurable effects.

Our push to incorporate research into UX ultimately benefits our users. It expresses our sincere desire to understand, in rigorous and reproducible ways, the people who interact with our products. However, I find that many of the named UX activities are too clothed in pretense to be accessible to folks just beginning in this career. This can lead new designers to perform a bunch of exercises that produce a lot of data, but little knowledge.

By stripping away terminology and thinking like a researcher, we can get to what it really means to have research at the heart of our design process. This way, we can clearly connect our research to our design.

Call-and-response design

As designers, we want each interaction to be meaningful for our users. Because the interface is a sum of many smaller interactions, it makes sense that we ought to know the specific meaning of each of those components. By doing this, we clearly assign a job to each element. This minimal approach gives us x-ray vision to look past visual style and focus on a user-centric, highly functional design.

Essentially, imagine an interface as a conversation between the product and its user. To make this conversation as clear as possible, each part of the interface should be assigned a question that the user can answer. We source these questions from our understanding of our users and the goals of our product.

Here's an example of how we can apply this approach to a hypothetical shopping application:

1. Navigation Bar: The question assigned to the navigation bar might be, "Where can I go?" Users should be able to easily find their way to different sections of the application or website.

2. Homepage: The homepage should prompt the question, "What is this about?" It should provide a clear overview of the product's capabilities and orient users to the fundamental areas of the site.

3. Search Bar: The question here could be, "How can I find what I need?" Users should be able to locate specific content or products efficiently.

4. Product Listings: Each product listing should ask, "Is this what I'm looking for?" It should present information, such as images, descriptions, and prices, to help users easy identify product offerings.

5. Checkout Form: This page should ask, "Can I trust this transaction?" It should convey security and transparency to ensure users are comfortable completing their purchase.

6. Notifications: The question here is, "What do I need to know?" Notifications should convey important information without overwhelming the user.

Minimize complexity, maximize relevance

By assigning questions to interface areas, designers create a system of justifications that support their decisions. This approach has several benefits:

• Simplified user flow: Users can easily navigate the interface because each element serves a clear purpose in answering a specific question.

• Reduced cognitive load: By optimizing for functionality, the design reduces the amount of information users need to remember and making their interactions more intuitive and comfortable.

• Enhanced engagement: When users find answers quickly, they are more likely to engage with the product and return in the future.

• Improved satisfaction: When users receive clear and direct feedback from their interactions, they perceive the product as efficient and user-friendly, leading to higher levels of satisfaction.

• Data-driven decisions: This approach encourages designers to base their choices on observations and evidence, ensuring that each element has reasoning and purpose.

Collaborative advantages

It's worth elaborating on how well this question-and-answer method facilitates group work. By beginning with testable questions, we know how to measure the success of a given component and the collective design. Collaborating on a cross-functional team (read: product owners, developers, analysts, marketers, etc.) becomes more efficient when we work off of a shared framework. The guiding light is always: What helps the user, and thus, the product?

This makes it easier to rationalize changes to the design, too. By focusing on the quality of the questions we ask, design becomes less presumptuous (I have seen it done in this way before) and instead more inquisitive (the user has this need, and we could accomplish that this way).

Applying to an example

Take this example: We might discover that users aren't finding their way to an important topic on our site. We intended for them to do this by typing in the name of the topic into a search bar, but in tests this seldom happens. So how can we approach this like a researcher?

We begin with the question we assigned to this area: How do I discover topics? The quality of this question is important, because it provides a framework for measuring the success of that area. We might focus on the word "discover"... how would this design support a user discovering a topic, if they don't know which topics exist as options?

We can refine this further. We have a suspicion that more users will successfully navigate with the feature if we choose a design that surfaces the available options at the time of interaction. So we can articulate our rationale as: Users need to discover a topic, but we found that the search bar did not provide enough context. Let's try an alphabetic dropdown, because it provides more context.

We arrive at a testable hypothesis: If we include context in the design, more users will navigate to the topic successfully.

Ultimately, when we are open to allowing our findings to guide our work in an iterative process, we really become researchers.

Takeaways

Vocabulary doesn't make the researcher, questions do. Research is not a checklist of activities, but rather, a informational strategy.

As designers, our mission is to create interfaces that facilitate meaningful interactions between users and products. Assigning questions to different interface areas, and intentionally selecting elements to answer those questions, is one strategy to cut through the noise of your design process. By focusing on functionality and relevance, we work towards accessibility, reduce frustration, and lay the groundwork for a more productive user experience.