🪙 In the economy of user effort, be a bargain, not a scam
Ignore: #VioletPixel.com/posts/drafts
Summary: An incredibly clarifying post about usability by Lea Verou.
Tags: Links, Usability, User Experience, User Interfaces, Design
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Lea Verou in an outstanding post on usability and user experience:
A model with surprising predictive power is to treat user effort as a currency that users are spending to buy solutions to their problems. Nobody likes paying it; in an ideal world software would read our mind and execute perfectly with zero user effort. Since we don’t live in such a world, users understand to pay a bit of effort to achieve their goals, and are generally willing to pay more when they feel their use case warrants it.
Just like regular pricing, actual user experience often depends more on the relationship between cost and budget than on the absolute cost itself. If you pay more than you expected, you feel ripped off. You may still pay it because you need the product in the moment, but you’ll be looking for a better deal in the future. And if you pay less than you had budgeted, you feel like you got a bargain, with all the delight and loyalty that entails.
That's just one example of Lea deftly articulating a key usability concept in a way that provides rich clarity. There are several other things in the post like this that made me think, "yes, that's exactly the right way to explain that!"
A must-read for anyone who cares about usability and craft.