User is drunk

Australian designer Will Dable offers an interesting metaphor that helps develop simple and user-friendly interfaces. A developer who knows his system far and wide and gives a large part of his life to work on it is very difficult to imagine how an ordinary user will work with it, whose head is full of other things. Especially if he tries his product for the first time in his life and is not yet sure about its usefulness. To imagine what is happening in the head of the user, Will Dable suggests imagining that the user is drunk. His attention is absent-minded, he easily loses his temper, he doesn’t see very clearly and doesn’t move very confidently - if you constantly remember this, the interface will be cleaner and simpler. The essence of the method Dable tells in this five-minute video:



Key points of the method:

• A drunk person sees everything blurry, so you need to make sure that the main function of the page is clearly visible and completely understandable. You can even take a screenshot and specifically blur it so that small text is not readable - if it is still clear what is required from the user, the interface is good.
• He has scattered attention. If any complicated sequence of actions is required of him, he should literally be held through her hand - first X, then Y, and only then Z - and not interfere with everything in a heap.
• Repeat twice. Important and dangerous actions should be accompanied by warnings and reminders, like this: "You are about to delete an X object ... You have just deleted an X object"
• A drunk person is easily annoyed. For your site, this may mean that if something does not work out, the user can simply spit on everything and close the tab. Put someone to test the interface and carefully observe where the person begins to show signs of irritation - they definitely need to work on them.
• Last but not least, the user is drunk, but not stupid. A person with IQ 160, even getting drunk, still has an IQ of 160. Do not hold the user by an idiot, simplify everything to impossibility, and obsessively explain every little thing. Need to respect his experience and knowledge.

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