Disrespectful Design — Users aren’t stupid or lazy

Originally published on somehowmanage.com, I’m publishing it here for posterity. There’s also a fun comment section on HackerNews around this article.

It’s a common narrative in tech to design products with the assumption that users are stupid and lazy. I think that is both disrespectful and wrong.

The idea is rooted in a lot of research around product usability, but it has been bastardized. Thing of it as a perversion of the Don’t Make Me Think thesis.

Don’t Make Me Think, the seminal web usability book by Steve Krug, tells us that products should be as simple as possible for users to use. Products shouldn’t be self-explanatory (ie understandable given a set of instructions), they should be self-evident (ie so obvious that they can be used without having to read instructions). A good door has a push/pull sign to make it self-explanatory, but it still requires you to read and think. An even better door wouldn’t even need that label at all — you know what to do instinctively.

But somehow, we’ve perverted that idea. Users are lazy, even stupid, we say. They just want to flick their fingers down an infinite feed, letting their eyes wander from item to item.

But in Don’t Make Me Think, Krug never refers to users in a derogatory way. He tells us how good products should work, and why basic psychology supports that. People want to reduce cognitive friction as much as possible. People don’t like unneeded cognitive friction. People…