4 invisible UX, which you never knew

Great design invisible

Airbnb, Disney World, Uber and Nest. These are all phenomenal products whose total value exceeds $ 135 billion. But not only their services have achieved excellent performance, their interaction with the user is so well thought out and executed that it leaves their strategy unnoticed. In other words, the “user experience” remained in the shadows.

A good designer can organize chaos. An experienced designer can eliminate this chaos.

When designing user interaction with a product, the most common question I ask myself is: “ What are the smallest actions a user must take to achieve the desired result? ”

Who will enjoy messing around with drop-down lists, input fields or buttons? Sometimes as designers, we can be distracted by the extra noise, thinking through user interaction. We focus on " beautifully designed forms " because they are easier to use. I found this method effective enough to think about the ultimate goal and work in the opposite direction. This will allow you to pay attention not only to the user interface, but also to really focus on the important things.
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“The design is obvious only in retrospect”

As designers, it is important for us to more holistically represent both the product itself and the interaction with it. Pixel polishing is certainly necessary, but user interaction is so important that an unnoticed design is even better.

The founder of Netflix, Jared Spool, explains how Netflix sends its users a survey asking them to note what they like most about the service. Clients respond: “A large selection of films, a tool of recommendations that helps the service become better in general.” However, no one mentions the quick functionality of the site, the intuitive and well-implemented interface.

Jared Spool:

“At that time, all these things, carefully crafted by Netflix designers, went unnoticed by customers ... This is not because they are not important. This is because the designers really did their job well - they kept all these moments in the shade. ”

1. Airbnb - Design is more than great pixels.

When booking a place on Airbnb, it indicates the cost that the owner wants to receive when placing guests who have contacted him. In retrospect, Airbnb may have hundreds of “free” places to sleep, but if the owner of the apartment does not provide such places, you can only have a negative experience.

So what does Airbnb do to quickly give you real value?

Everything happens behind the scenes. Searching for Airbnb is quite simple, and the forms are very minimal. When you make a request to Airbnb, the latter uses machine learning to determine preferred housing.

Without going into details of how this works, Airbnb created a machine learning model that studies the behavior of owners and their requests for housing. With this understanding, the company can optimize the requests of "guests" with the results of the search for housing, the owners of which will take your request as a priority. This makes Airbnb's user interaction more meaningful, because most likely you will receive a quick and successful response from the landlord.

I have not yet met a host who would not answer.

2. Disney World - magical experience of interaction, without the costs of the market.

Disney World has invested $ 1 billion in a program called MyMagic + . Why? Because it allows the company to avoid additional costs associated with the purchase of tickets, booking tables in restaurants, seats on shows and attractions. This magical experience of interaction is realized through invisible design.

Everything starts with booking your places of visit. Behind the scenes, the company "captures" us, using our interests. With the help of this data, Disney World splits your preferences and then travels through the park - the bracelet tries to “guide” the user along a path that seems optimal for the system.

This invisible experience also flows into the restaurant booking mechanism. When you order a table, the restaurant owner already knows your name. In fact, you can sit anywhere, and your food will magically find your way to you! How? The restaurant is equipped with modern sensors that open a whole world of new opportunities for their owners.

Disney World , knowing your location in their magical park, also opens up many opportunities for delivering more and more great user interaction. Just imagine that your favorite children's characters will come to you themselves, instead of wading through a line of people who also want to play with them.

As you have noticed, great design brings a great user experience.

From a business perspective, the company is able to optimize every route of people seeking to better explore the main attractions of the park. When visitors spend less time in queues, they can do more, and ultimately spend more!

3. Uber — Destruction of the whole industry on one screen

Taxi on demand.

Has anyone thought that you could blow up an entire industry on one screen?

Before the advent of Uber, using a taxi turned into a nightmare. Being in a traffic jam at 4 am in the winter in Sydney is not the best pastime.

• You do not know when the taxi will be free.
• You do not know where a taxi is waiting for you.
• You do not know the exact fare to the desired location.

Uber's user experience design is phenomenal. From the point of view of interaction, Uber solves all client uncertainties on one screen.

In an open application ( with location mode turned on ), the user does not need to interact with any interface elements to find out the exact fare. In my opinion, this is a great example of a one-page design industry. They stuck to their foreheads: “To which smallest actions should the user perform in order to achieve the desired result?”

The application allows you to:

• Keep track of where taxis are now available.
• Calculate the time of arrival, ordered a taxi.
• Call the user experience Uber ( only at first glance ) trivial and retrospective. Recalling the previous experience of " ordering a taxi "; The most obvious “solution” seemed to be a phone call leaving the dispatcher with his name and indicating his blurred location.

If you have noticed with the success of Uber, the whole concept of booking a taxi has diminished. Uber does not allow "to order a taxi for tomorrow "; He destroyed and turned over all the standards and expectations of the industry.

4. Nest - self-learning thermostat

Today's thermostats are expensive, complex and inefficient. Tony Fadell saw this as a major problem, so he created Nest. As a designer of 18 generations of the iPod and 3 generations of the iPhone , he used his skills to create a " smart thermostat ".

Most people do not program their thermostats due to a variety of reasons - for me this is due to the fact that they are very inconvenient. The Nest team has realized how experienced user interaction is that it is literally hidden.

During the first week, after installation, the thermostat will examine your preferences and personalized schedule. Here are some of the features that it includes:

• The ability to track your location using the location settings and power on when you are far away.
• Based on the preceding paragraph, the device allows you to warm or cool the room before you return home.
• Nest captures your habits at night and turns off the power.
• The signals tell you to save energy.
• Nest's valuable suggestion is that you teach their device their habits, which later helps you to save.

This is great because everything happens behind the scenes. The only thing that is required from the user is to monitor the temperature during the first week. No need to mess around with unnecessary user interface elements. No wonder why nest was acquired by google .

Splash application "personal assistant"

Gorgeous ( invisible ) design comes at a great price.

As we tolerate technological advances, we improve our understanding of these technologies, data, user behavior and their expectations, and all user experiences are becoming more and more real. That is why there was a surge and growth in demand for personal assistant applications.

What does Portal, Emu, Vida Health, Mindy, Cortana, Siri and Google unite?

They are all steps to achieving an experienced user experience. All aimed at achieving such an interaction, when “data processing” occurs behind the scenes. “In the consumer’s face, why do I need to click on the form to say what I need? Is it because we still use the old methods, or is this interaction really better overall? ”

I believe that some of these personal assistants are still largely dependent on the manual configuration of the user, but as these startups continue to capture more and more information, the ability to automate many manual work will soon become available. In the next 5 years, we will see technologies that will become even more integrated than ever, and interaction with them will become even simpler. I am absolutely shocked at what the Microsoft Cortana team is doing!

Conclusion

I hope that you have learned something interesting from this article, and you can put these design principles into practice. I urge you to explore new ways to interact with digital products. We live in the digital age, where many things are possible. Leave the comfort zone of trendy patterns and trends - they do not last forever.

“Man has done all these things, and he can improve them. Do not be afraid. Go to action. - Tony Fadell