“At what point in this process should we ask for the user’s email address?”
“Will people like this chat feature?”
“Are hamburger menus bad for UX?”
User experience professionals are sometimes criticized for a little phrase we often use:
“It depends.”
When we’re asked questions, UX professionals will often respond with, “it depends.”
Usually, that phrase precedes a lot of follow-up questions.
What’s the product?
What problem are we trying to solve?
Who are we designing for?
What’s their mental model?
What are our goals?
What’s the company culture?
Why do we rely so much on this phrase?
Well, because UX is so contextual.
What works in one situation may be terrible in another.
Partially, that’s because we’re designing for human beings.
Some things are consistent across different groups of people.
For example, we all have similar limitations on our memory.
So some guidelines (like, don’t make people carry too much information in their short-term
memory) will stay constant and applicable to most situations.
However, as human beings, lots of things can influence our behavior.
Our motivations, our backgrounds, our education levels, or our previous experiences, for example.
So, what will be best for your users depends on who your users are.
Additionally, which design works best will depend on our goals — what are we trying to achieve?
Let’s take one of those questions for example.
Are hamburger menus bad for UX?
Hamburger menus received a lot of criticism when the pattern first emerged as a trend.
That’s because they hide menu items, making them less findable and less discoverable.
But are they always bad? It depends.
We have to ask questions to find out.
Who are your users, and what is your product?
Are they a group of retirees who don’t use smartphones often?
Well then, those users may be less familiar with the pattern, and the hamburger menu might
be bad for their experience.
Or, are your users tech-savvy developers, who spend lots of their time on mobile devices, and
who might be likely to have lots of prior experience with this pattern?
If so, the impact of using a hamburger menu with that group might not be all that bad.
Additionally we can ask, are which devices are we designing for?
Maybe this is a responsive design and the hamburger menu will only appear on smaller
devices where there’s less screen space.
In that case, the hamburger menu might be easier for people to find and recognize on smaller screens.
So, the detrimental impact to findability could be worth the advantage of conserving
limited screen space.
Design decisions almost always involve a cost/benefit analysis.
We’re always weighing the consequences.
The contextual nature of UX design is why we warn people against blindly adopting design
trends or copying designs from different contexts.
Just because a design is working for Apple’s ecommerce store doesn’t mean it’ll make
sense for an enterprise application for accountants.
In product design, it’s easy to slip into absolutes.
We can say things like, “users hate popups.”
Well, do all users actually hate all popups all the time?
It depends on the context.
What we really mean is, “Most users in most situations don't like popups.”
Guidelines are rules of thumb.
They’re likely to be correct in a majority of situations, but there are always special cases.
Use best practices, guidelines, and patterns to inform your design decisions, but always
remember to pay attention to your context.
This is why research is so important for design.
User research is how we answer our follow-up questions and get the context we need to make
decisions, so we don’t just stop at “it depends.”