A frequent remark during Wordle’s rise to prominence was praise for its simplicity. With its minimalist website and clunky URL, the game has the retro elegance of a daily newspaper puzzle. But Wordle’s unassuming grid of letters is optimized to spread across digital feeds. By the time The New York Times purchased Josh Wardle’s creation for a price “in the low seven figures” on January 31, the game had grown from 90 users in November to the millions who now play the irresistible brain teaser daily.
Wordle’s success is instructive for designers looking to streamline their product’s user journey. While it’s tempting to build tools with a fleet of innovative features, simplicity lends itself to the greatest level of user acceptance and interaction.
But how do you know when to pare back? As Michael DeSimone, vice president of product and data science at adtech company Yieldify, noted: “We know it’s time to simplify part of our user journey when we have upcoming features that are being developed specifically to that aspect of our product. Any new feature that builds upon current designs runs the risk of overcomplicating a user journey simply by offering more functionality without more ease of use.”
Built In New York checked in with DeSimone, Capitalize’s Emily Lounsbury and Codecademy’s Sam Provenza to learn how the three local product design professionals keep things simple while pushing forward, and why fixing problems sometimes means removing barriers instead of adding solutions.
When do you know it’s time to simplify your product’s user journey?
Codecademy, like most software products, is constantly evolving as we add new features, pricing tiers and course curriculum to our catalog. All of these new decisions add complexity to the customer journey, so it’s our job as designers to constantly reevaluate existing workflows to ensure the new experiences we are designing are still enabling our customers to complete the jobs they are trying to do without overcomplicating the user flow. This is generally easier to do in an iterative process so you are continuously working to simplify the user experience from multiple touchpoints as different projects advance. This approach can also have the added benefit of preventing the need for a major redesign of the entire product, which can be time-intensive and costly.
What process do you use to identify opportunities for simplification?
The best process, in my opinion, is a mix of qualitative and quantitative research to identify where customers get stuck and drop off. At Codecademy, we rely on user interviews, usability testing and tools like FullStory that record customers using our product to find the pains and gains in our customers’ workflow. We’re also lucky to have a UX writer on our team to help audit our site and uncover opportunities to simplify how information is displayed, such as our navigation menu. In addition to these user sessions, designers also collaborate with product managers and our data science team to track user metrics and identify any drop-off points in our key user flows.
We recently made an update to our upgrade flow for our Codecademy for Business product, which is used by companies to help train their teams. We used FullStory to create a map of the current flow. By looking at the user journey holistically, we were able to identify steps that could be combined or completely removed, which allowed us to simplify the entire flow and release a more efficient user experience.
It’s important to map out a holistic user journey to understand what the customer is doing before, during and after interacting with a feature.”
What are some common traps designers can fall into that result in an overly complicated user journey?
It’s important to map out a holistic user journey to understand what the customer is doing before, during and after interacting with a specific feature you might be designing. Designers sometimes jump too quickly into high-fidelity mockups and skip this step. By looking at the user flow, it’s much easier to identify where there might be too many steps or too many decision points.
When do you know it’s time to simplify your product’s user journey?
Simplicity is a key component to any successful user experience, and something we prioritize at Capitalize. The nature of fast-paced startups can often result in features being designed and developed in isolation from one another and lead to unnecessary complexity within a product experience. It’s important to consider the full end-to-end experience, even when designing isolated features or flows. Sometimes, decisions made along the way that compromise on simplicity can add up, and a larger reevaluation of the entire journey could have a great impact on the user experience.
Some key indicators that may point to an overly complicated flow include abandonment rates or drop-off, which may be the result of confusion. Time spent on tasks is another indicator. If users are taking increasingly longer to complete specific tasks or are clicking back and forth through a flow, this could indicate that there are opportunities to simplify. Finally, we consider feedback from users. Net promoter score surveys or abandonment surveys may indicate confusion, or an influx of customer support queries could point to an overly complex experience.
It’s important to consider the full end-to-end experience, even when designing isolated features or flows.”
What process do you use to identify opportunities for simplification?
At Capitalize, we strive to make data-driven decisions and to support hypotheses about our product’s potential with insights or analytics whenever possible. We look to qualitative and quantitative data to gain insight and evidence to validate our ideas.
In a recent funnel analysis at Capitalize, we identified a point of abandonment when users were shown six options to choose from, with a detailed comparison to help facilitate a decision. After conducting several user interviews, we learned that users were not feeling confident making a decision and that information included was difficult to understand and compare. We then conducted a larger panel survey to learn which factors are most important to users when making a choice. With this insight, we limited the results to only three options and focused the information on only the most important factors up front, leaving the supplemental details collapsed for further exploration.
The feedback from this design was largely positive. Users had an easier time discerning which product was a better fit for their needs and felt more confident about their decision based on the information provided.
What are some common traps designers can fall into that result in an overly complicated user journey?
When talking about simplicity, it’s important to define what simple means in the context of your specific audience. Simplicity can come in many forms, so it’s important to consider what level of simplicity will benefit the end user.
For example, many consumer-facing products benefit from having more steps with less functionality at each step. Breaking pieces out into smaller, more digestible parts simplifies the process, even though it creates more clicks. On the other hand, a product with power-users like internal tools or SaaS products often benefit from having fewer steps with more functionality per step. In this example, intentionally adding complexity in certain places simplifies the overall experience.
The most important thing is to understand the problem you are solving and to validate that simplifying the experience will solve that problem. Identifying key success metrics also helps ensure the solution has the expected outcome.
When do you know it’s time to simplify your product’s user journey?
At Yieldify, whenever we develop a new feature, we focus on identifying how we can simplify the surrounding ecosystem to make the new feature accessible and representative of evolving design decisions we make as a company.
This allows us to see better adoption rates across our features and ensure that our developers can apply deep focus to new features and their surrounding design, rather than juggling features across countless codebases.
What process do you use to identify opportunities for simplification?
To make sure we can always be aware of how to simplify key user journeys based on features on our upcoming roadmap, we make sure to keep consistent and varied lines of communication open between product and our end users. These communication strategies include usability testing and user interviews, product adoption tracking and open communication channels.
With testing and interviews, we engage our end users with prototypes and testing as part of all feature development to understand how they will use this feature and gain feedback around the user journey as a whole. Product adoption tracking, meanwhile, involves using tools to identify whether users are engaging with our current capabilities. Finally, we host open forums for regular feedback.
An example of how these practices combine together to create better designs was when we developed our capability to run A/B/n tests. Through interviews, we identified that users were concerned about the amount of time it takes to rotate through each test’s creative to determine the differences between tests. As a result, we redesigned our campaign review page to place campaign designs above the fold and reduce design load times in our preview mode to make sure designs are naturally accessible.
Designs always require the feedback of end users to be successful.”
What are some common traps designers can fall into that result in an overly complicated user journey?
One trap is building designs without end-user testing. Designs always require the feedback of end users to be successful. By engaging users with simple tests on how they can use a new feature to complete various tasks, you can easily evaluate whether copy is clear, systems are logical and users naturally know what to do without instruction.
Another trap is building designs without developer support. Designs need direct input from developers to ensure that they are technically feasible and not overly complex. By sharing designs with developers ahead of evaluating a feature’s complexity, it allows for projects to be easily estimated and managed.
Building designs without multiple use cases in mind is another trap. Features should never be designed for one single use, and understanding the various ways a feature will be applied will avoid designs breaking down as more users engage with the feature.
Finally, even if a design is perfect in isolation, it needs to be developed to ensure that it can properly pass the right information to other codebases, and that it will be able to provide long-term value in terms of adoption tracking and ability to support future features.
