I’m working on a big design project, and a challenge I’m facing is around information architecture: What is important to the users and should be surfaced and highlighted in the UI, versus other content that is not as important. What our user research has shown us is that what is important to users is never consistent – it varies from person to person. Which makes it kinda hard to formalize an IA.
So I’ve started looking at intent and use, to identify user needs. This is where I have found some measure of confidence and success in my design… because I’ve determined that for user’s it’s about what is important right now, not all the time. What’s important is what raises awareness and produces a “call to action…”
Think about your life. Think of all the information that surrounds you every moment of every day. The bar codes on the products you buy, the signs you encounter, the billboards you see, and the articles you glance through. These details, most of the time, are trivia. You need to know what is going on, but only to act and react, and not to have an absolute vision of everything at your fingertips.
If you tried to have such an all-encompassing vision and awareness, you’d go crazy. The human mind can’t process that much – it’s not wired to. So, you focus… usually unconsciously. Even when your mind is wandering you still are focusing on something.
Nobody cares about the details – until they have to. You act when you become aware something has to be done… or that something has gone wrong.
Think of the crew of the Titanic, when they saw they were heading towards the tip of the iceberg… if they had the ability to do a “deep dive” and find out more information (knowing just how big the problem really was) they may have made a better decision. We all know how that turned out.
So, as a design strategy in your UI, think about showing just enough – just enough for the users to act and react appropriately – and then let them dive into the additional information they need to make an informed decision. It’s not about providing EVERYTHING – it’s about providing a path for the user to quickly access to what the user needs to know when they need to know it.
Is this just another way of saying, “keep it simple, stupid?” Yes, but it also a technique and design approach that allows you to push back against shareholders or business leads who want to throw everything, including the kitchen sink.