Title: Decision Fatigue is Why Designers Need to Respect Consumers
Context: Making your users make too many decisions makes them make other purchasing decisions.
Synopsis: Click here or click there? Drag this and drop where? Right click or file menu? Sure these are all infinitesimally small choices that we ask our users to regularly make. Individually the cognitive load we ask people to carry when interacting with our products is light, but when you aggregate all of these miniscule logic forks the load can become unbearable for users already inundated with torrents of external issues to resolve. Simplicity. Elegance. Intuition. These are the tools that truly drive what we like to call “ease of use” which is actually a synonym for “ease of thought”. Not over-taxing an individual’s already strained judgment should be every designer’s primary focus. Unless of course you already have lots of other decision making on your plate…
Best Bit: “However my point here is not that to design good products, services or environments we need to focus on creating simpler user experiences. Actually it is.”
Leave a Reply