In a war situation, the basic survival principle is to kill the enemy before it kills you. This same principle applies to UX designing as well. There are lots of elements or ‘enemies’ that can kill your design and the most significant one is friction. This is something that you should seriously think about and kill it before it kills your UX. Frictionless UX design is something that will prevent the users from achieving their goals. It will provide them with everything other than what they want such as:
• It will create confusion
• It will cause a lot of distraction
• It will force the users to hesitate and
• It will do anything that will compel the users to think twice before they proceed.
All these will not only slow down the process but will also reduce the level of user experience by a considerable margin so much so that the user may even leave the site opting for another suitable alternative.
Smoothing out friction
There are different steps to follow if you want to smooth over friction points in your UX design. With a little effort you can achieve this.
The first step for an UX designer is to ‘Know Thy Enemy’, which means you have to identify the friction points which is also called the ‘cognitive load’ academically. However, in UX design it refers to the factors that tax the attention and brain of the users. There are of course a few cognitive loads that are necessary but that should be always kept to the minimum. Cognitive load can be divided into two parts:
• Intrinsic cognitive load refers to the thoughts of the users that are typically involved in achieving a goal. For example, when the users think while clicking on the ‘Categories’ tab whether or not they will find the content they want, it is termed as intrinsic cognitive load.
• On the other hand as extraneous cognitive load is essentially anything and everything else that leads to a friction such as when the users wonder where on earth they can find the categories tab.
Therefore, extraneous cognitive loads can be all those unwanted frictions that can be manifested specifically as:
• The busy visuals that actually distracts or confuse the users
• Inconsistent nature of the UX design that makes the user wonders why a particular button looked different on the previous page
• Anything that makes the users to make wrong decisions and perform unnecessary actions and
• All those features and functions that is unfamiliar or new to the users.
Believe it or not, the designers may do their best to keep these frictional elements away from the site but the fact is such frictions slip in accidentally. This is the main reason that a design must be externally consistent always. This means that it must be in line with expectations of the users as well as their previous knowledge. It is also required to make sure that the UX design is internally consistent as well. This means that it should have good visual hygiene all across the pages.
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Target specific forms
Apart from being consistent in design you will also need to target more precise forms of friction as a part of your interaction design best practices. You can follow these general tips to achieve this.
Reveal redundancies:
You can do this by making a list of the user flow steps along with the separate action required to accomplish a particular task. If you consider the logging in task you list should include:
• Clicking to open the login window
• Clicking to enter the username in the desired input field
• Entering the username correctly
• Clicking to enter the password in its designated input field and others.
You will surely notice a lot of redundancies in these steps. You can then work accordingly to reduce the repetitive steps such as clicking user name input field and log in window. These you reduce to provide a better user experience if you design it in such a way that it will open up automatically. However, along with shortening the number of steps you must also ensure that each of these steps is also easy and effortless.
UI Patterns:
You must ensure that the UI patterns followed are recognizable to provide a better and frictionless user experience. This will help the user to avoid learning how anything new works whenever they encounter such things which will create friction. In order to maintain external consistency it is therefore necessary that you use appropriate and recognizable UI patterns as much as possible. These recognizable conventions are:
• An envelope icon to represent email
• Micro copies with clear text such as ‘submit’ instead of ‘go ahead’
• Providing default settings
• Well guided actions
• Well described stepped forms and others.
These conventional patterns will not make the users to put in any extra thought to identify and perform a specific action. All these will not only reduce friction but will also prevent any momentary confusion. Remember, clarity always comes before cleverness in creating a frictionless UX design.
For example, the default settings, guided actions, and stepped forms described in Web UI Design Best Practices are especially useful for reducing friction.
Proper navigation:
This is another specific format to make your design frictionless. However, you must build navigation based on the user research to make sure that:
• Nothing goes wrong with the navigation which will eventually make it a layer of potential friction
• When you learn from the users you can easily theorize the best navigation by streamlining the process according to their needs
• You will be able to incorporate right user testing to reveal and inherently categorize the accessible data and information
You may also focus on creating a better site structure with card sorting, which is extremely effective because it is based on the natural thought patterns. If you have a better site architecture it will also help you in tree testing the information pathways.
Lastly, make sure you group together all the visual elements to make more meaningful and comprehensible.
