What takes an user experience from good to great?
To design UX of our products we need to understand some psychological principles to a certain extent of how people think so that we can predict how they will interact with our products.
In our daily life or let’s say while doing our daily chores we generally act based on small amount of information because we have made a habit of doing so.
For example, when I wake up in the morning and go for brushing, I do not stand in front of brush stand to think and pick up my brush. I have developed an ability to recognise the design pattern of my brush and that’s why I can easily differentiate my brush from my sister’s.
So most of our knowledge of how the world works goes into our subconscious mind and we rely on habit and patterns to go about most of our daily lives. We have always used patterns to derive meaning without having to spend mental energy and time doing a more detailed inspection.
And this is why we have design patterns for user interfaces too. They allow us to navigate applications without having to think.
The less we have to think about when interacting with everything in our environment, the better.
These things are as simple as, without even looking, knowing which button is ‘Cancel’ or ‘Submit’ based on the shape, size, and colour of the buttons. Or it can be using floppy disk icon for saving a document.
Now we can guess how important these UI patterns are for our products.
We should learn from these patterns and create natural user experiences, ones that we understand and that feel natural when we have them. And remember your beautiful UI can’t compensate for your broken user flow.
We have to create experiences, real experiences.
A human mind understand it’s environment by interacting with it, measuring how it responds and then learning something. These are feedback loops. For every action there is a reaction. It will then make a decision based on that reaction.
If we again look at some of the tasks we do on daily basis, we can see what part of our mind is really concentrating on what.
For example, When I lock the door while leaving for the office in the morning, I turn the key and I go on. But if we look closer, it’s only really when I hear the sound of the lock clicking into place that I know the door is locked. It’s a feedback that my subconscious mind is listening out for.
Now imagine if I were to perform the same task but as I turn the key, nothing happens. Without that feedback loop, how do I know the door is locked? The feedback loop is broken and suddenly something doesn’t make sense. And now I’m confused.
Do we want this experience for our product users? A big No.
All of our experiences are full of feedback loops, there will be some sort of reaction. And for most of them we were not consciously paying attention to. But this is how we understand our experiences and what makes them feel natural.
We need to make sure that on every single, very small action our user performs, we respond them back so that we never leave them confused not even for a second. And let’s make it natural.
While we spend a lot of time working on the UX flows and making sure the UI is beautiful. We should never forget about the little details that make our experiences feel real.
