Comment by tejohnso
9 hours ago
> if you don't put sidewalks and pathways in the right places, people invent their own.
To expand on that a bit, you can deliberately avoid putting in paths so that the natural behaviour becomes clear. You'll see paths develop between areas that you might not have thought of. Pedestrians are flattening grass and showing connections that are actually useful rather than following lines that have been set out for them with competing priorities in mind like aesthetics or budgets. Then you take that data and create paths that "users" actually want, based on their behaviour / use of the previous system.
I definitely love this approach IRL. I think the closest you can get is watching what users try when they’re unfamiliar with the application. Sadly, it seems like actual user testing is rarer now than ever.
“UX Designers” seem to worship at the Jony Ive/Alan Dye altar of minimalism and “airiness” and tell anyone who will listen that every type of user, for every type of task, gets “overwhelmed” if you give them ‘too many choices,’ so instead of natural direct paths that people would have chosen, modern software is more like a series of white rooms with exactly three exits each, and the exits are labeled with an icon when they’re labeled at all (many are impossible to label because they’re swipe gestures), and other exits only appear when you step near them (the hover nonsense).
The other thing that can hurt an applications usability is over fitting for the new user. It is an important aspect, but it feels terrible to be effectively stuck in baby mode all the time.
The hard part is how fitting for the new user and fitting for the experienced user are sort of opposites in interface design. For new or occasional users who will only use the thing a couple times a year, you want a deep design, gently guiding someone unfamiliar with the application through each step in turn, lots of modes/clicks limited information in each. For the experienced user a shallow design is best, information dense, everything in one action, never hide anything. The best designers can sort of navigate this paradox, but for most you have to focus on one and shim the other.
As for design focused design, where the point is how good it looks, well, that sucks for everyone. But it looks good in the ads.