Hick’s Law
When designers make decisions, they already know what goals can be achieved thus objectives can be completed quicker, however, user’s don’t, this means the more choices there are on a website, the more time it takes a user to complete a goal or a task, for our job as UX designer’s we must shorten path as efficiently as possible.
What can I do to shorten this process?
- Minimise choices when response times are to increase decision time.
- Break complex tasks into smaller steps in order to decrease the cognitive load.
- Avoid overwhelming users by highlighting recommended options.
- Use progressive onboarding to minimise cognitive load for new users
- Be careful not to simplify to the point of abstraction.
“Onboarding is the process of getting users
familiar with a new interface. It can involve one
or more of the following components: feature
promotion, customisation, and instructions.”
Onboarding provides an effective way of acclimatising users to decision making and functionality, it gives them a more informed idea before actually conducting a task making them more aware at the task at hand.
Offboarding is a term I’m not too familiar with, similar to onboarding, if customers don’t want to use a company product or service anymore, this provides the user an experience to the end when they are deactivating a service. However, when it comes to offboarding, the demands are at the user, not the company. Dark patterns are interactions specifically designed to benefit the company at the direct expense of the user experience. They try to ‘guilt users into remaining a part of their services by employing a design that manipulates/heavily influences them to make certain choices. An example that Paul has used, was the same trick I fell for in G2A back in the day – when canceling, G2A manipulate the users into “leaving G2A shield active” which is coloured green.
The importance
- It leaves great final impressions – making a company more likely to be ‘liked’
- It increases the likelihood of referrals
- Increases the opportunity to improve a product and messaging
- Offers a ‘final chance’ for a customer to stay around