User experience (UX).

I was recently working on the design of a website interface for an AI side project with a good friend of mine.

I mentioned that I’d been struggling to keep the design as simple as possible, considering the especially technical nature of the project.

He mentioned a fabled old saying from a Yosemite National Park forest ranger that he’d seen online: “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists”

It made me laugh, so I made this diagram:

And I suppose this really is the essence of designing good UX - it’s a balancing act.

As a founder / developer / designer, you live and breathe your product(s). You know every feature, shortcut, backstory and edge case. You can navigate the interface with eyes closed (you built it!)

Then you ship it out into the real world, where actual well-meaning humans with short attention spans, less vest interest, and less patience come in contact with it - and inevitably there’s always something they just don’t get.

Steve Krug nails this in his delightful book Don’t Make Me Think on usability and user experience design. The fundamental principe (which applies to pretty much every website, app, interaction, conversation with customers) is simple: users shouldn’t have to puzzle over how to use your product.

No one should need to crack a Zodiac cypher code to navigate your micro-SaaS web application. Your target customers come to your website to accomplish a goal and move on with their lives.

Your job is to make it stoopid easy.

Of course every visitor to your website interface is different, which is what makes this challenging. Each person comes with different context; perhaps a slight variation of a common goal, different expectations for what your product does or how it works, based on who they are, where they came from, and how they found you.

Early on it can be hard to recognize this; hard to see the forest from the trees. It’s so important to keep design in the loop from the start, because of course, there are real world costs to building poorly designed experiences :

• Users abandon your product before they experience the value.

• They leave negative reviews.

• They forego referring their friends about you because ‘its too complicated’.

• Your conversion rates crater and your acquisition costs soar

Luckily there are UX design solutions. And the answer is not to ‘dumb down’ your product per say, it’s to be smarter about how you present the complexity

Designing for Dumb Humans (with <3)

A few ways to mitigate the costs of poorly designed UX:

1. Start with 80% use case - consider the 80/20 principle; what do most people want to do most of the time? Make that incredibly easy and hide more advanced features behind progressive disclosure.¹

2. Test with ‘fresh eyes’ - once you have a functional prototype, get people who have never seen your product before to test it (and watch them!!). Notice where they pause, where they click wrong, where they give up (more in Steve’s book)

3. The power of obvious - Another great saying: clever is the enemy of usable. If you’re proud of how innovative your UI is, you are excluding the set of users who lack context to understand (this is the reason why so many website look alike these days)

4. Flows > features - Don’t organize your interface around your back-end internal logic or tech architecture. Organize it around what your users are trying to accomplish. If you don’t know, re-read and try steps 1-3 above.

5. Make errors impossible - the best UX prevents mistakes before they happen, versus handling them gracefully. A user can’t mess it up if you don’t let them :-)

At it’s very core, good UX is about empathy. Remembering that YOUR USERS are not YOU. They don’t share your context, expertise, or mental models of how your product works.

This is not to say they are dumber. They are just different. With different goals, different constraints, different levels of patience, and different contexts. The best UX artfully accounts for these spectrums across various users and make it work beautifully for everyone.

It really is an art form, probably more so than a science.

Apple has always been a textbook example of this - designing immaculate user experience into every little thing they do, from unboxing your iPhone to designing your own apps on their infrastructure.

Steve Jobs has a famous quote here that I think about often: “Simplicity is the highest form of sophistication”. Keep this in mind as you design your UI/UX.

Your users will thank you.

Peace,
Ramsey

1  Progressive disclosure = reduce complexity of interface by incrementally layering content / function based on customers progress thru an application (ex: sign-up flow)