When we watch people having issues with our designs, we often make every attempt to improve the interface for better usability. But have you ever watched a usability test and found yourself faulting the user, calling him “the wrong type of customer,” “stupid,” or worse? One of the more offensive labels I have heard assigned to users is “lazy.” If the design offers everything users need, why are they doing the task wrong? If they would just read a little more, scroll a little more, or explore the features a little more they would find the right way to do things.
Instead of accusing the users, try to understand the reasons behind their actions so you can create designs that align with natural human behavior. In particular, watch out for the following 3 common user behaviors that make the user seem like the lazy culprit when, in fact, they represent examples of efficient human behavior that we need to design for:
- Device inertia
- Momentum behavior
- Selective attention
Users tend to choose the path of minimum effort. And all the listed behaviors represent situations where the user’s perceived benefit of taking a better action is too small compared with the perceived cost. The alternative path is considered inefficient (too expensive in terms of user effort) and not worth it. Also, the alternative path may simply be undiscoverable or invisible to the user.
Device Inertia
A few years ago my fiancé and I were sitting on the couch in our living room and were using our smartphones to browse for flooring for remodeling our home. We encountered several UX issues: we couldn’t see the wood grain very well, we struggled with filters to display the types of floors we liked, we had trouble comparing choices in the one-window, small-screen environment. Each time we had an issue, I would say to Steve, “We should go do this on the computer,” while still swiping on and staring at my 3-inch iPhone screen. To which, he would respond “I know,” continuing to look at his phone and pinching out on an image of some wood swatch. This interaction must have happened 20 times, while 2 fully-charged tablets awaited on a table a mere few feet away and 2 fast laptops attached to 32-inch monitors sat at attention only two rooms away.
I told Steve I was disgusted with our device inertia, and have been using the term for this behavior ever since. Device inertia occurs when multiple devices are accessible to the user, but he continues to use the device with which he is currently working, even if a different device is potentially much better suited for the task at hand.
The main reason behind device inertia is, as mentioned before, that the perceived cost is too high compared with perceived benefit. The perceived benefit of switching to a bigger screen is being able to see larger pictures and make better comparisons. But the perceived cost is going to a different device, navigating to the desired site, and redoing the search on that device, an effort that seems daunting to users suffering from device inertia.
If the user made an explicit calculation of time and effort spent versus what would be saved, then the comparison would come out in favor of moving to the optimal device in all those cases where a fair amount of additional usage were to happen. But the calculation would come out in favor of continuing to use the current device if there was only one more interaction left. Most human beings have an extraordinarily short planning horizon. As long as people keep operating on hunches, their natural inclination is to look only one step ahead, and thus, stick with the current device.
Mobile phones and computers are obvious competitors, but there are many other opportunities for device inertia. For one, I recall an accessibility study I did years ago with a person who had cerebral palsy. He had limited fine-motor control, so to move the computer cursor large distances he would tap the mouse on its side, which would move the cursor quickly to the vicinity where he wanted it. But to move the cursor to a very specific place on the screen, like over a particular link or image, he would use the keyboard’s arrow keys. He did these actions many times during the course of our study: smack the mouse, tap, tap, tap an arrow key; smack the mouse, tap, tap, tap an arrow key; smack the mouse, tap, tap, tap an arrow key. However, sometimes when his finger was already on an arrow key and his next desired action warranted moving the cursor a large distance, he continued to use the arrow key instead of tapping the mouse. The mouse would have been faster and easier, but he instead chose to tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap... the arrow key. Why? Probably because he was already using the keyboard and the perceived work to switch devices seemed higher than just staying with the current method.
Note that device inertia is not limited to technology. In the kitchen a cook is using a fork to beat some eggs, then uses that same fork to try and flip a piece of fish frying in a pan. The spatula hanging on the wall would be a better tool for flipping, but she has the fork in hand already. A gardener is digging holes with a small spade as he plants flowers. He encounters some deep weeds, but instead of reaching for the weed popper, he makes do with the small spade.
Momentum Behavior
When I was working on the Freelance Graphics presentation-package design team at Lotus Development, my first job out of college, I recall coaching my friend who was also a recent graduate. She worked as a CPA at a large accounting firm in Boston and used Freelance. She would often make suggestions to bring back to the design team, such as, “Why don’t you guys let people add a logo as the background?” And, “Maybe make it possible to choose a color that isn’t one of the recommended ones.” Almost all of her ideas were already features in the software, and we were working on making them discoverable in the UI. But, in the meantime, my friend found different, cumbersome, and inferior methods to do the tasks. For example, rather than adding a slide background, she added the logo to each slide and moved it to the back-most position. And, instead of choosing a color from the “custom colors,” she chose the closest color from the “basic colors” palette. These solutions were flawed in that they did not produce the best output that the system could deliver or that the user desired, and they took more of the user’s effort and time to complete than the optimal path in the UI would have taken.
Let me establish that my friend is a very intelligent person and is not lazy. Yet she stuck with the suboptimal methods she had discovered by herself because:
- She found those methods first.
- It did not occur to her that the software provided a better or easier way to complete the tasks.
- The methods worked well enough.
Continuing to use inferior approaches is an example of momentum behavior. Over years of watching people use designs, I’ve seen many examples of momentum behavior. In our book Eyetracking Web Usability we describe momentum behavior like this:
Momentum behavior occurs when people look at but do not choose an option that could help them because they have already selected a course and are sticking to it. Even within moments, users can become loyal to the route they have chosen and oblivious to other interface elements.
Momentum behavior happens when parts of the interface are not strong enough to call to users when they need them. In other words, a name, style, or placement is not enough to draw people to the path they should take. Another cause of momentum behavior is the fact that people don’t always look for the most direct route — they’ll follow what we call an inferior path just to get their task done, even if it ends up being the scenic route. If it does occur to them that there may be a better route, they feel that either they won’t find it or it will take too long to try.
Momentum behavior reflects another instance of low perceived benefit versus high perceived cost. In this situation, users find that taking the time to explore the interface and learn a new procedure (that is, the perceived cost) far outweighs saving a few seconds over the procedure that they’ve already learned.
Selective Attention
Selective attention is a long-known human behavior in which people focus on a particular object and ignore other information that they perceive to be irrelevant. For example, imagine you are in a noisy restaurant where the tables are positioned very close to one another. You can clearly hear the conversations at adjacent tables, but you select to tune them out and listen specifically to your dinner companion. Or you are checking the weather in an app on your phone and purposefully look away from the animated advertisement and focus on the temperature and images of the sun and clouds.
Depending on the design, the situation, the individual user, and the past experience, certain elements on the screen (sometimes useful, sometimes useless) may get ignored. So selective attention may help or hurt users.
Imagine a user is reading the news on a news site. She’s very focused on the story and doesn’t look at the navigation at the top at all. Ignoring the navigation doesn’t hurt the user in this scenario because she doesn’t need to go anywhere else. But this same user, who was very engaged with the topic and wants to read more, is so focused on the More from This Author information at the end of the article that she doesn’t see the Related Links that appear at the bottom of the page. This last situation is an example where selective attention hurts the user.
Selective attention is also the result of a cost–benefit analysis, although this one is more ingrained in human nature and probably dictated by evolution. Every moment humans are flooded with stimuli, and it would be highly inefficient to pay attention to every one of them. If when crossing a street in Manhattan we paid equal attention to the fashionistas’ outfits and the aromas wafting from the garbage cans as we did to the traffic, we might not move fast enough to get out of the way of that yellow taxi bowling toward us. Humans have learned to pay attention first and foremost to the important stimuli and ignore stimuli that were proven less menacing or interesting by prior encounters.
On the web, our prior experience has taught us that banners, navigation menus, search, and other chrome often appear at the top of pages. As a result, we tend to ignore banners and anything that looks like advertisements, unless we are specifically looking for deals or suggestions, and focus on the region where we expect the content to be.
Solutions for Web Designers
Here are some strategies to help keep users from becoming unsuccessful victims of device inertia, momentum behavior, or selective attention:
- Make important tasks, if not all tasks, easy on any device. Research the most common devices used and focus on these.
- Do not assume that users will actively switch from phone to tablet or computer to do particular tasks.
- Allow users to easily sync information across different platforms, so people eventually learn that tasks started on a phone can be easily resumed on the desktop, without a lot of redundant work.
- Through behavioral research and analytics, study the most common paths people take to complete tasks. If the best one is not the most commonly taken, work to make it more discoverable, findable, and usable.
- Refrain from making important UI elements look like advertisements or like content that people have learned to ignore.
Above all, try to find the best design solution instead of just labeling the user as lazy. Human evolution has taken a million years to produce the users we have, so they are not likely to abruptly change the way they devote mental resources just because they are dealing with your app or website.
To learn more about how human behavior affects web usage, consider attending our full-day course The Human Mind and Usability.
