On and off I'll refer to cargo-cult UX. I don't expect most of you to know what a “cargo cult” is, but it's such a useful analogy that it's worth taking the time to explain.
To engage in cargo cult anything means going through motions but without understanding why. It's imitation without knowledge.
First, a quick primer on cargo cults. During World War 2, Melanesian islanders, many of them never having seen outsiders before, watched as Japanese, and then American, cargo planes and ships belched forth all kinds of goods that, to the islanders, must have seemed like an impossible bounty — canned foods, medicine, machinery, and more.
Some islanders made the observation that cargo planes landed after you cleared a strip, flanked it with lights, and performed a ritual involving walking stiffly in formation. Not having any context besides what they could observe, they concluded that, if you were to repeat those motions correctly, cargo planes could be enticed to land, bringing more Spam and cotton t-shirts. So, once the war ended and the Americans left, that's what some islanders did: They'd clear a path, make it look like they remember landing strips looking like, and try to imitate the dance those guys used to do to bring in the planes.*
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That's a short version that leaves out almost everything. More on cargo cults at Wikipedia.
What does that have to do with UX? Glad I asked. Cargo-cult UX is repeating something you've read or heard without knowing its rationale or context. Follows some common signs of cargo-cult UX.
Counting clicks
Sooner or later, someone is going to say, “There should only be two clicks”. Or three, depending on which UX article they read. They proceed to evaluate the user experience by counting clicks. This is bunk. That person just acquired a dunce cap in the minds of every actual UX designer in the room. Don't be that person.
“Users need to be able to get to anything within three clicks or less.”
Reality is, the number of clicks is a minor issue. The quality of each click is the issue, and the complexity of the end goal is the issue. One link to get somewhere is meaningless if you have to sit there and scan a cluttered page for that one link. Would you expect to do your taxes in two clicks? Of course not. Pay for a pair of socks on Amazon? Maybe. There is a flip side, of course. Find a company's phone number on its Web site? Absolutely. That's something obvious that should not require multiple clicks.
Now look at my first example. Measuring the user experience of H&R Block's tax prep application by counting clicks would be absurd. You could and should count how many steps it takes to register or log in, but then you still shouldn't be counting clicks. You should be counting steps.
In my second example, Amazon's checkout, it depends. You can check out in two steps (one-click checkout is two steps, guys), but only after you've set up a payment method — which takes multiple steps. As it should. Again, counting clicks would be absurd.
In my third example, we're talking pure information gathering, which is where counting clicks is least silly. You should do the up-front work when you design your site to identify a few key pieces of information that need to be easily available. Like, your phone number. If you're a restaurant, your menu. Your opening hours. Your location. These are obvious things that often are buried under “About Us”. That is silly. For other information, on the other hand, it's OK to have more than two or three clicks if it doesn't take detective work to figure out which links to follow. The goal is not to make people have to guess.
Scrolling is bad
If I had a dollar for every time someone has said they're concerned that users have to scroll …
Look, this has been thoroughly debunked over and over. Yet, I still hear it repeated — “we want everything to fit on the page with no scrolling”. It's like the old canard that daddy-long-leg spiders are the most venomous on earth. It's nonsense, but people still repeat it.
It's sad. Nobody ever read the bottom half of the newspaper, because it was below the fold.
Don't believe me? Here, this has a bunch of sources you can peruse.
People can and do scroll all the time. Squeezing your form on to the top 600 pixels of the page serves no other purpose than to clutter it up. (I'm not making this up. As of this writing, I just heard a project manager specifically ask the designer to use some of the “wasted space” to cram a form into a smaller space.) Two, and only these two, factors matter:
- Can you clearly see that there is more below the bottom of the browser window?
- Are you motivated enough to keep going down the page?
See that last one? Whether people scroll is up to your content or functionality. It's your job to make sure what's on the page is worth scrolling to, not try to cram ten pounds of peanuts into a ten-pound bag.
Don't be a cargo cultist
Leave UX to people who do it for a living. Here's something that never happened: The UX designer who went to meetings in Accounting and gave advice on how to run the company's books because he used Quickbooks once. Something else that never happened: The UX designer who went and told the head of HR the company should pay less, because she's read somewhere that employees aren't motivated by money.
Please.
* Footnote time! Let's not confuse naive with stupid. These people were no less intelligent than you or I; we just have an enormous amount of context that they did not have. They drew conclusions based on what they knew and could observe, which is what human beings have always done. It's not that different from the belief our ancestors held, the common observation most humans have made in the past, that we're standing on a disk lit roughly half the time by another burning disk which appears and disappears at regular intervals. Mind also that there's a great deal more history and context to cargo cults than a bunch of people thinking Spam will fall from the sky if you wear the right pants. Read more on Skeptoid, if so inclined.
