(This article was published as an April Fool's hoax and does not contain real recommendations.)

I was recently listening to “Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love,” which presents the astronomer’s achievements in a most matter-of-fact and underwhelming way, given how much he propelled the sciences of physics and astronomy. At one point I was moved to punctuate a book passage with, “Look at how much people achieved before they had television!” My underlying point was to blame what my father lovingly referred to as the “idiot box” for unimpressive lifetime achievements as compared those of Galileo. I'm sure we can all quickly derive a long list of excuses for not being creative or thinking deeply — meetings, email, the internet, long work days, commute, kids, dogs, yardwork, housework. And all these things are time-consuming and can be energy draining.

But there is something else that limits our deep thinking: too simple interfaces. It is time for designers to question the effect that universally easy designs have on humans and society. Consider, for example, when a web search returns top results that include helpful information that the user wants. Is the search engine really doing people the best service? Would a teacher just tell a student the correct answer if the student did not get it on the first try? Would a coach give a point to a novice basketball player when the shot bounced off the basket’s rim? If they did, their students would never learn.

Similarly, by making designs simple, designers encourage these negative user behaviors:

In short, easy designs encourage people to be mediocre users. What’s the solution? Designers should not be so universally motivated to make interfaces easy. Instead, they can make the designs more difficult and thus, provide stimulation for people to think harder, exercise their brain more, and become the next Galileo or Einstein. Designers have the power to force people to think deeply and be creative as they do everyday tasks like checking email and browsing the web. If we made people work harder to solve their information needs, we will educate them and encourage them to grow. Moreover, users will:

  1. Earn problem-solving skills and expand their cognitive capabilities
  2. Be capable of discovering the most-hidden interface features
  3. Cultivate a sense of achievement and closure
  4. "Master" the design to feel more in control, and have the sense of joining an elite club

The following are some effective techniques to train users become the best users that they can be.

1.      Make navigation joyfully surprising

If website navigation is too easy, users will not have the opportunity to derive their own models and theories for organizing the site’s information. A challenging and unexpected navigation will exercise users’ detective skills and thus will train their working memory, which eventually will increase in capacity. It will give them a chance to practice their fine-motor skills and increase their hand-muscles’ strength as they click or tap repeatedly through the many links to discover which is the right one. And let’s not forget about the sense of accomplishment and job well done that users will experience after successfully finishing a web-related task.

2.      Use walls of text to encourage users to read more (instead of scanning)

Scanning, a behavior in which users typically engage on the web, is known to decrease comprehension. Designers try to accommodate that behavior and repair the damages done by lack of reading through clever formatting and keyword frontloading. Yet, if text were presented in a single long paragraph, with no font variations, users would be forced to actually read it and thus expand their knowledge about the world and about the website. Their attention span would increase and their comprehension would thus improve.

For an extra bonus, make the typeface small and lower the contrast: the closer people sit to the screen, the closer they obviously engage with your brand. Also place the text on top of a background image. This visual treatment will force users to focus better and may even prevent the dreaded middle-age presbyopia (or farsightedness). It will also ensure that people only read the material when they sit down at their desks and can control the lighting conditions. (We all know that reading on the go on small smartphone screens decreases attention and is prone to interruptions.)

3.      Do not optimize sites for mobile or tablets

Smartphones and tablets are the modern day’s plague: People no longer talk to each other, their social skills are significantly affected, and they are always connected to the internet and to their work. Say no to mobile technology. By making no allowances for these smaller-screen devices, we create more opportunities for actual interaction. When users won’t be able to find what they need right away on their device, they will engage in one of the following desirable behaviors: (1) call the business, which will exercise their social skills, (2) try harder, which will sharpen their problem-solving abilities (in addition to their working memory and visual acuity), or (3) ask a friend or colleague, again being social instead of introverted.

4.      Disclose little to zero information upfront; make users go deeper on your site to find more

We all know that in real life pogo sticking is an excellent form of physical exercise. You’ll be surprised to know that on the web, as well, it can significantly improve the cognitive prowess of your users. For example, when a list of products hides important details such as pricing , users will certainly be intrigued, will engage in guessing and hypothesizing, and will then click on each of the products to verify their guesses. You can only imagine their overwhelming satisfaction when they finally discover that their hypotheses were right. (Not to mention, again, their bodybuilder-worthy finger muscles after all that clicking.)

In the case of Google, at least 50% of queries should be met with a one-line SERP (search engine results page): “That’s a stupid question. No links for you.” (Traditional usability guidelines for writing for the web might recommend making this response into two bulleted items for enhanced scannability, but that would defeat the point of making the user think deeply and commit to writing a more complex query that would be worthy of an answer.)

5.      Gamify the user experience

In gamification, unlocking more features or tools based on achievements is quite common. For example, a skateboarding videogame allows the skater who passes a certain level to access better equipment and enter more interesting skate parks. These are desirable extrinsic elements, but couldn’t the intrinsic reward from successfully completing the task be the achievement? If the task was tricky enough to do it, then yes.

So next time when you design an interaction flow, ask yourself: how can I make users work harder? Perhaps you can ask them to solve a puzzle to assemble the different fields in a form, or maybe they could engage in a joyful “shoot the target” game where the links on the page are playfully selected by shooting a gun cursor rather than clicking or tapping with a boring arrow.

Putting These Ideas into Action

Here are a few more examples of how these principles could be applied in actual site design to make users smarter and expand their capabilities.

MSPCA-Angell website

​The MSPCA-Angell website has a simple navigation with high-level topic links and homogeneous items within those topics. The mega menu employs progressive disclosure and the Gestalt principle of proximity, among other things, to help people process the options.

Blue bar with white text at the top of the MSPCA homepage
Hovering over the blue horizontal menu on the homepage opens the mega menu.
Blue mega menu of adoption centers
The open Adoption Centers menu displays locations and links to adoption-related tasks.
Get involved menu links for volunteering
The open Get Involved menu offers multiple ways to interact with and assist the organization.

The MSPCA could make their users work a lot harder. Designs they could try include:

  • Moving links from under the expected menu to an unexpected one (for example, moving Boston to the News & Events section)
  • Showing all menu links at once in alphabetical order, and color coding the related links (for example, all link that now appear under Get Involved would be green, while all Adoption centers links would be red)
  • Mixing up the photos to create a more challenging connection between pictures and menu labels. For example, using the photo of elephants to illustrate Search Adoptable Animals would make users ponder whether they could afford to feed their elephant after adoption. (Since an elephant eats 300 pounds of food per day, some people might prefer a smaller animal, and it’s obviously better for everybody concerned if people consider such issues as early as possible in the process.)

Since people coming to this site are likely charitable and kind souls, they will want the site to succeed, and thus will try harder and tolerate more work.

Nike+ Running app

Nike’s running app suggests training programs for different running goals and offers a large, red, easy to tap Run button at the bottom of the screen (NN/g recommends a 1cm x 1cm target size for touch screens, and on my iPhone 6 this button is about 5cm x 1cm).

day 73 says run 5 miles at an easy pace
The Nike+ Running iPhone app: The Run button is too easy to tap: it’s plenty tall and wide, and placed at the very bottom of the screen. The finger is also already in its proximity.

But the app could make the runner work a little harder. If the button was smaller to tap, runners might focus more, train their motor dexterity, and feel a higher sense of achievement after tapping it. (Think of the benefits that smaller buttons could have for designers, also — how much more they would be able to fit on a small screen if only users were trained to deal with smaller targets. And, in the long run, if our interfaces will only contain tiny targets, maybe natural selection will finally solve the obnoxious fat-finger problem that afflicts much of humanity.)

Even more interesting might be to animate the button so that it moves around the screen. The button could jump just out of the way before it is tapped. Of course, this can only be done a few times (we recommend 7 plus or minus 2) before the button finally stays still so it may be tapped. Given that Nike’s users are often training for marathons and log hundreds of running miles before the race, these people will surely enjoy a challenge and will work for a prize.

day 73 with tiny button and button moving
Proposed redesign of the Nike app: Think of how satisfied marathoners would feel after tapping the tiny target in the left image, or after finally triumphing over the moving button.

Create Genius Personas

Design teams often use personas to focus their team on users. These personas usually include attributes such as rushed, busy, stressed, and uninterested in or uneducated about a design or a technology. Personas often exclude descriptions such as smart, hard worker, wants to try, and gets satisfaction from struggling and learning. We can update our personas and always include a “genius” user type to offset all the mediocrity. For example, focus your team effort on a persona that exemplifies someone like Einstein, da Vinci, or Galileo.

Galileo likes to experiment and be challenged
An example of a genius persona you might want to create to encourage your team to creatively challenge users

Designers of the Web, Unite!

The suggestions in this article will be fruitless unless all designers firmly commit to this goal and follow these principles in all their designs. On this day of April 1 st 2016, we’d like to make a historic plea to designers everywhere: let’s work together to improve the human race. Let’s all forgo immediate advantages such as improved productivity or increased sales, and let’s instead serve the greater good: harder interfaces and a smarter humanity.

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