If your users have to pay atten­tion to your inter­face, there’s some­thing wrong with it. Your inter­face should be invis­i­ble, not obvi­ous.

Con­sid­er the ubiq­ui­tous office-build­ing door. As you are leav­ing the office build­ing, you approach the door and instinc­tive­ly grab the han­dle, pulling it to open the door. But to your shock and dis­may, the door doesn’t open.

Then you see it, the lit­tle sign above the han­dle that says PUSH. You feel like an idiot because you can’t open some­thing as sim­ple as a door.

The design of that door inter­rupts the users’ task and cre­ates a neg­a­tive expe­ri­ence. If some­thing as sim­ple as a door requires instruc­tions, there’s some­thing inher­ent­ly wrong with the design.

A door should not require users to pay atten­tion to it in order to use it. Instead of a han­dle, a bet­ter design uses a flat pan­el on the door, which invites only one action, the cor­rect one, to push.

With a pan­el instead of a han­dle, you push the door open and walk out with­out giv­ing the door a sec­ond thought. The flat pan­el makes the door “invis­i­ble.”

You Can’t Design ‘Delight’

I’ve heard so many peo­ple say they want their design to delight the user. While it sounds good, you can’t actu­al­ly design “delight.”

A door with a pan­el will not delight you, but it won’t inter­rupt you or cre­ate a neg­a­tive expe­ri­ence, either. It is, essen­tial­ly… invis­i­ble.

Though you can’t design “delight,” you can design inter­faces that avoid neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences and help the users com­plete their task with a min­i­mum of effort, thus cre­at­ing a sense of “delight.”

Ex: Selecting Shipping Methods

Con­sid­er the ubiq­ui­tous ship­ping method selec­tion in a typ­i­cal ecom­merce site. You’ve seen a thou­sand of them, but I’ve only found one that does it cor­rect­ly.

How many times have you had to stop and think about which method to use and won­dered exact­ly what day your pack­age would arrive. Must of that con­fu­sion lies in the ter­mi­nol­o­gy they use to describe the choic­es, such as 3–4 busi­ness days. You prob­a­bly won­dered if that includ­ed Sat­ur­day, since the deliv­ery com­pa­nies oper­ate on Sat­ur­days.

ProFlow­ers elim­i­nates the con­fu­sion by offer­ing a cal­en­dar and ask­ing users to select the day they would like the flow­ers to arrive. This lim­its the ship­ping choic­es to only those that achieve the desired deliv­ery date. This sim­ple change removes any doubt or con­fu­sion and makes the user feel con­fi­dent that the flow­ers will arrive on time.

I’ve seen oth­er meth­ods that attempt to reduce user con­fu­sion, such as esti­mat­ed deliv­ery dates, and deliv­ery rules for each selec­tion, but each of these are lit­tle more than instruc­tions on a door and none are as “invis­i­ble” as the ProFlow­ers approach.

How Do You Measure Invisible?

So how can you “see” some­thing that’s invis­i­ble? Like track­ing an invis­i­ble man in the snow, fol­low the foot­prints, your site ana­lyt­ics.

Review the page paths that typ­i­cal users fol­low. The more times a user revis­its a page, the less invis­i­ble or delight­ful your design is to them. If your site ana­lyt­ics show that users flowed direct­ly through the site with­out hav­ing to revis­it the same pages, then your design is more invis­i­ble.

You can also sur­vey users to under­stand their per­cep­tions about com­plet­ing their task on your site. Com­pare their per­cep­tions with actu­al results to mea­sure the effec­tive­ness of your design. The 2 things you can use to gauge the invis­i­bil­i­ty are:

• Per­cep­tion of time: How long did users think it took to com­plete their task. The less time it feels like it took vers­es actu­al time, the bet­ter your design.
• Num­ber of pages: How many pages do users recall using to com­plete the task. The few­er pages they recall than they actu­al­ly vis­it­ed.

If users com­plain about the num­ber of pages or the time it took, then you’ve failed. But don’t think that few­er clicks or pages are the answer, either. The point is to design a UI where the pages become invis­i­ble. As oth­er blog posts dis­cuss, few­er clicks or pages are NOT the right answer. It’s real­ly more about the right num­ber of pages for the task.

It Takes a Practiced Eye

An unfor­tu­nate side effect of the invis­i­bil­i­ty of good UX is that, if done well, no one notices it. If they don’t notice it, they don’t val­ue it.

I’m often asked for a port­fo­lio of my UX designs by poten­tial clients, many of whom who usu­al­ly focus on the visu­al lan­guage or tech­ni­cal fea­tures. These clients don’t get it and I usu­al­ly turn down those projects.

I used to try and edu­cate these folks, but one thing I’ve learned after 25 years as a UX design­er is nev­er try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.

If, how­ev­er, the client describes how eas­i­ly they under­stand the inter­face or web­site, I know they are focus­ing on the right aspects of good UX design and work­ing with them will be mutu­al­ly suc­cess­ful (and enjoy­able). Our design meet­ings will be about the psy­chol­o­gy of user expe­ri­ence and how to make the inter­face “invis­i­ble,” not about what col­ors will “delight” the user or how many more fea­tures we can add.

On your next redesign, rather than falling prey to the com­mon, yet inef­fec­tive, approach of striv­ing to make your design stand out, focus, instead, on mak­ing it invis­i­ble. That’s not to say that tech­nol­o­gy and visu­al design are unim­por­tant, but that there needs to be a bal­ance between tech­nol­o­gy, visu­al and UI design. That del­i­cate bal­ance is not easy to achieve, but will launch your sin­gle dig­it con­ver­sion rates into the realm of dou­ble-dig­it suc­cess­es.