Control vs being led

how to guide users through your product.

Before going out for a run, I usually plan my route. It can be a big circle with several laps, or just a quick 30-minute run before work. While running, I follow my regular pace and breathe. At those times, I was controlling my own run.

But when I attend my Yoga classes, I like to follow my instructors, mostly because I’m not very experienced with Yoga and the poses require a certain level of complexity and precision to be effective. In this case, I prefer to have someone lead me through the activity.

The behaviors change nothing when we use software.

Human behaviors barely change. What we behave in real life, we behave the same in digital worlds.

We’d like to take control of familiar things.

Email tools show it all out and let you do whatever you want to.

When using email software, the tool allows you to control everything. From organizing your emails, tags, to composing emails freely the way you want. It doesn’t even need to explain to you what CC or BCC mean, but you can just go ahead and use it without any worries.

Because we’re so familiar with emails; it has been around for over half a century (since the 1970s). We all know exactly which fields go with which content, and we completely control this email tool.

Steps in the flow for composing emails can give us more guidance or support (which most of us don’t need), but it will likely slow down the process.

We get confused controlling things we aren’t used to.

Hmm… It appears I can control any tool I use. I’m tech-savvy anyway?

That was my though until I use the Vietnam Personal Tax Income declaration tool — which was a painful experience.

Tool menu on the left side, showing all features. You’ll need to access to some of them to finish the declaration, but there’s no step-by-step or guidance provided.

The first time I use the tool, I asked myself tons of questions “What should I select here?”, “What kind of labour do I belong to?”, “Where can I find this number to fill in?”, “What happens if I click on this? Can I go back after that?”.

Eventually, I had to search for instructions and follow it carefully (some other companies even published slides to guide their employees). After I got the final number that I need to file, I still wondered if it was the correct one, or if I missed anything.

What make this even more painful is, I can’t use any alternative tool, and I can’t drop the task either.

Both Email and Personal Income Tax filing tools show all information on screens, no step, and lack of instructions. Then why do they give us such different experience?

The point is, both of them let users take control, but only one has the right approach, which is the email one.

For personal income tax declarations, I rarely do them, maybe once a year, but they have a certain complexity, such as requiring precise numbers and information, which need to fill out and which don’t. My need in this case is to complete the tasks quickly with as much help as possible. That’s when the software should lead users.

When do users want to take control or be led?

It depends
— said by every UX designer, to every UX problem.

Depend on tasks users do

Let’s break down each quarter of the chart:

1. The first zone allows users to take control of tasks they rarely do. This can be confusing for them as they are not sure if they’re doing it correctly. They may have to try and fail many times. E.g the personal income tax filing tools.
2. The top right corner once again allows users to have complete control over what they will do, but for tasks that they are familiar with. This speed up the process, allows users to skip unnecessary steps, help them achieve their goals faster. E.g email tools.
3. The bottom left is how the personal income tax filing tools should be done. Leading users through difficult tasks they’re not regularly doing.
4. The last one mentioned familiar and frequent tasks, but was designed to lead users, offering too much help. This is like composing an email, but the tool makes you fill out the receiver’s emails, CC, BCC, subject, content, and attachments in separate steps with detailed instruction and explanation. This approach may have been good in the early days of emails/internet, but not today.

Depend on user levels

This part gets back to a basic question: who do you design for?

Take the example of KPI management software. Most of these software are designed in the form of CMS or ERP, with lots of data tables to compare and edit.

Some tools require a certain user level to be efficient.

You can practice using them every day, but if you don’t have the knowledge of managing KPIs in order to read and understand the terms, numbers, and how it should work, you’ll probably have a pretty hard time.

Therefore, understanding the target user when designing will be the key for designers to make better decisions about the software’s approach.

Depend on user goals

Once you know who is your target user, there’s a high chance that your design team will realize the goals or needs of users are not just encapsulated in one or two cases. On the contrary, it’s diverse.

However most of the goals will fall into 2 groups:

• Focusing on completing the task. (Productivity)
• Playing around and less focus on task completion. (Explore)

The first goal group is usually related to users’ jobs and work, with a clear target to achieve when using software. They interact with the tool because it helps them reach their goals. Depending on the tasks included in the tool, designers should either give users the control they need for familiar tasks, or provide detailed help for complex tasks, as long as they can complete them quickly.

For the second group, providing enough initial help (typically in the form of onboarding) and then allowing them to control and explore is a sound approach. Additional help can be shown as they navigate to a new feature for the first time, but not too overwhelm to maintain their eagerness to explore.

Design to fulfill more goals

Beside a reasonable user flow, designers should add some interaction in order to create customizable experience to fulfill more goals from different groups of users.

Smart Defaults

“Typical” option will install default package to default Disk in the next steps.

• Suggest users a default option based on most selected one.
• Make sure users can easily change to other options.
• By this way users can move on with fewer steps (want to get the task done) or custom to fit their needs (exploring around).

Progressive Disclosure

Facebook set the default share with “Friends” on new posts. But you can have more custom on it.

• Usually go with smart defaults.
• An interaction design that helps users focus on what matters to them in the first place and reduce cognitive load.
• If they don’t care about the detailed options, then no need to show them. But when they do, there is an additional flow to do it.

There are more interaction designs to fulfill goal diversity, but the two patterns above are widely used and serve as greate examples.

TL;DR

Designers can create a smoother experience by learning when to give users control and when to lead them through the flow. This requires understanding their software usage level, context, needs, goals, and tasks.

And we can also see that user research plays a significant role in product design.