Enhance your experiences by embracing the familiar
Designing product (app or web) experiences can be challenging, if not daunting. As designers, we strive to design to solve problems through effective design, while at the same time, serve user needs elegantly and delightfully. As part of our crafted solution, we are asked to support a growing constellation of devices and touchpoints that our users desire. Accordingly, we are expected to gracefully balance quality and contextual orchestration, which is no small feat.
As an example, consider Sophia, a young adult interested in fitness and working out with friends. On her laptop, she shops and learns about Peloton and its available purchase options. She receives delivery status notifications and sets up her Peloton account on her smartphone. While on her Peloton bike, she browses available live classes and joins her friends in a virtual cycling class. Finally, using her AppleTV Peloton app, she participates in a Yoga session. Her interaction with Peloton is the new normal, Sophia expects unified and cohesive interactions across a constellation of desired devices.
Our work as designers has exponentially grown to support our users growing appetites for quality, coherent, and omnichannel experiences. Unless you’re Google or Amazon, though they have their limits too, you’ll likely be limited to finite design resources. Thus, another factor to be balanced, is keeping an eye on our design investments and being ruthlessly efficient.
And while balancing all of the above, the painful truth must be kept at the forefront (and I know it will sting to hear this!) — users don’t care about how unique we think our experiences are. They want experiences to work like other apps/sites that they use on a routine basis. Just watch a fellow non-designer use an app or website that doesn’t work like Instagram or Google. You’ll hear a litany of “this doesn’t make sense”, “why can I find this”, and “this app is garbage.”
Jakob’s Law
Users spend most of their time on other apps/sites. This means that users prefer your app/site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.
Mere-exposure Effect
Users have already invested hundreds of hours learning other user interfaces and affordances from Apple, Google, Facebook, and Spotify, to name a few. Consequently, they will judge the quality of our experiences based on their familiarity with apps or websites they frequent. In fact, it’s a psychological phenomenon called the Mere-exposure Effect.
In essence, additional exposure to something increases the chances they will prefer it. For instance, if your users are often using Instagram, they’ll tend to prefer other apps that have similar language, visuals, or interaction patterns.
Affordance Pyramid
With this in mind, I believe it’s important to appreciate and embrace our user’s investments in learning other experiences. Therefore, I propose the Affordances Pyramid to help shape our designs. Similar to the classic Food Pyramid, we work to consume more veggies than say cheese. The same is with the Affordance Pyramid, we utilize an operating system and adjacent app/site affordances more often when building experiences, and spend less time creating unique interaction patterns. By doing so, we can tune our focus towards solving more problems, discovering differentiators, and cultivating our experiences to new and emerging touchpoints and platforms.
A Few Benefits
- Deliver experiences that are more familiar and take less time for your audience to learn, thus increasing use and adoption.
- Your audience will perceive your experience as valuable and high-quality
- Produce quality solutions quicker both from a design and development perspective
- Dedicate more of your time solving user problems and serving their needs, rather than debating norms.
- Distinguish your experience from others by investing more time in your experience’s differentiators and innovations.
Operating Systems Experiences
From their laptop, smartphone, or wearable, people are using an operating system likely designed by Google, Apple, or Microsoft. These companies spend millions of dollars investing in researching, designing, and testing user interfaces for their operating systems and official apps (Gmail, Apple Calendar, Photos, etc.). The choices they make affect and influence billions of users every day that use a laptop, tablet, or smartphone. With this in mind, I propose considering accordances (interaction patterns, language, guidelines, etc.) already adopted by the large population users.
If I have seen further it has been by standing on the shoulders of giants.
— Sir Isaac Newton
Therefore, because people invest their time learning these affordances, it makes sense to leverage similar interaction models, terms, and patterns to establish fluency. Incorporating then fundamentals into our experiences encourages users to better operate our apps and websites. Moreover, I recommend reading their design system documentation and align with their common affordances and guidelines (Google Material, Apple Human Interface Guidelines, and Microsoft Fluent). By no means, I’m I saying blindly follow all of their guidelines. The big players are fallible as well. Rather, keep abreast of trends and use your professional judgment.
A Couple Examples
As a brief example, Google Materials offers internal and third-party designers and developers guidelines for crafting experiences for Andriod devices and across the Google ecosystem. The examples span from simple (typography, layout, interaction patterns) to sophisticated (advanced interactions, choreography, complex design patterns). Also, Google offers “Dos” and “Don’ts” to guide designers. If you’re designing for Google Andriod or the Web in general, I highly recommend flipping through their documentation.
Companies applying the guidelines
Popular companies recognize people will spend considerable amounts of time interacting with operating systems. Favorite experiences from Facebook, WhatsApp, and others acknowledge the importance of incorporating operating system affordances and tuning their experiences to align with their guidelines. For instance, if you’re using an Android device, you will see interactions that suit; if you are on an iPhone, you’ll see familiar patterns.
Adjacent Experiences
Admittedly, users are interacting with numerous apps or websites outside of our product experience. More so, they have favorite experiences they use the majority of the time (see below). Beyond interaction patterns founded by operating systems, it’s integral to identify the affordances recognized by users while using their beloved app or website.
The chart below illustrates 2019 Apps by Worldwide Downloads. Research your audience when targeting which adjacent experiences to benchmark.
Illuminated below, users spend 77% with their top three apps.
Just as operating system companies (Apple, Google, and Microsoft), Facebook, Spotify, Amazon, and invest significantly researching, designing, and testing user experiences. To avoid reinventing the wheel and boost fluency, thoughtfully benchmark their experiences. In particular, consider a few of the below.
Interaction patterns — taking a picture, adding comments, or enabling FaceId
Legal patterns — agreeing to terms or displaying legal disclaimers
Microcopy — button labeling, success/error messages, or nomenclature
Consider the adjacent experiences used by your audience, especially the more popular ones. To better align with your user’s preferences, conduct user experience research to glean which apps or sites are most often used your users. Knowing their environment, you can cross-pollinate their patterns, language, and approaches to help lower your audience’s learning curve and present a more intuitive user interface.
Your Experiences
What’s most important about your experience is why someone should choose yours over another. If you’re remedying a problem or satisfying a need that matters, others will be following suit. One of the most important aspects of your experience is finding ways to solve a problem or satisfy a need better than the competition. Ask yourself, does your experience solve the problem or satisfy a need more than your competition? By building upon benchmarks provided by familiar adjacent app or operating system experiences, you can drastically devote more effort innovating and differentiating, thus making bigger impacts on people’s lives. Instead of debating everything, focus your our time on changes that have the most impact. Use techniques such as design thinking or discovery research, to intimately understand your user's challenges, and refine through continual feedback.
New Approaches or Patterns
Be thoughtful when introducing novel or new interaction patterns or models. If you do, be pragmatic and seek to understand the risks and efforts to replace an accepted affordance. If you decide to introduce a new pattern, rigorously test, and glean feedback. This goes without saying, don’t bend the narrative or results to support your opinion, be objective. Remember, in the end, your experience should be working to solve a problem; users usually are not impressed with your cleverness. They will value your experience if it makes their job seamless and effortless.
Ask yourself these questions
- Is the affordance or pattern broadly used at all levels? If yes, why is my approach better? Is it intuitive and easy to learn?
- How frequently would people use the pattern?
- Is an emerging pattern receiving acceptance?
Admittedly, as designers, we tend to design to impress other designers or trends towards novel ways to solve problems. We have to be careful not to do this at the expense of confusing or disrupting how people use our experiences. If you do introduce new patterns or ways to help users achieve their goals, please use caution and test your ideas.
By no means, am I advocating for less creativity. Rather, recommending you consider the advantages of cross-pollinating attributes from their favorite and most used experiences. We’ve all seen some of the clumsy, initial approaches by Google or Apple. That being said, if we fall into the trap of questioning everything and ignoring the investments made by users, we are just wasting time and likely frustrating our users. Honestly, we don’t need to reinvent everything, or test everything. Instead, I encourage you to seek to understand what affordances exist and leverage them. If you feel there is a better way, by all means, explore it. Just approach with a bit of caution and experiment with your users. I recommend facilitated usability testing and “in the wild” tests (A/B or multivariate).
Remember, people have likely already formed opinions on what they perceive as quality. Unless your approach is drastically better, they will reject your experience or negatively judge their value and quality.
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