How Dumb Is Your User?

I've been looking into game design lately, the relevance of which to user experience I have previously considered, and came across an interesting argument that has broader applications. The short version is: the dumber your audience, the more detail they need to understand what you are trying to convey.

In the context of gaming, an intelligent and imaginative player needs just a hint of detail, and his mind will do the rest. The example was early text-based adventure games in which the would provide a few scant details, such as "you are in a cavern; there is a torch on the north wall and a door on the south that is slightly ajar." This is all the detail needed for the player to project himself into that environment and see it with his mind's eye. In contrast, modern adventure games present lavishly detailed virtual worlds for users who may lack the imagination to become mentally engrossed if they were given scant detail.

It's very much like the old contrast between reading a book and watching a video. A book indicates "a gaunt man with deep-set eyes" and leaves the reader to imagine what this character actually looks like, whereas a video presentation presents a complete visual depiction of an actor, leaving nothing to the imagination. Some people can't "get" the picture from a description in a book, and need more assistance. Some people can, and resent an author who belabors them with lengthy descriptions that prevent them from thinking for themselves.

Ultimately, the experience exists in the mind of the user, and the designer of an experience provides cues and is, or ought to be, highly attentive to the choice he makes in the level of detail he provides which requires the user to complete the scene or prevents them from doing so. It's said that Ernest Hemingway could paint an entire scene in a single, short sentence, by providing a few basic details - but it would be more accurate to say that readers who enjoy his work are able to visualize a scene from only a few basic details.

While I don't necessarily agree with the suggestion that only stupid people need details, I'm inclined to agree with the converse: that a user must have a certain level of mental capacity to enjoy, or even understand, a depiction in which he has to use his own mind to complete the details.

Aside of entertainment venues, this difference also pertains to more mundane experiences, such as the design of a screen that enables a user to perform a relatively complicated financial transaction. The minimalist maxim of "less is more" leads us to strip away all the extraneous details in order to make the interaction simple for the user - but in this sense, the removal of help text, guidance, illustration, instruction, prediction, and all the "clutter" makes the interaction less understandable and more intimidating to the user who is not experienced.

An example to concretize this: the data the user needs to provide to set up a 401K is very basic: one text field to indicate what percentage of their salary to invest, six more to indicate how it should be apportioned between six investment options, and a submit button.

From a functional perspective, that's all the user needs, and a user who is familiar with the concept of investing and the options provided can proceed with confidence; whereas a user who is not familiar needs much more coaching to understand the implications of his selections. He's going to need a lot more information, with pictures (charts and graphs), to understand the choices he is making and conceptualize the probable outcomes.

Could the unsophisticated user accomplish his task using a sparse interface? Probably so, at least insofar as he could bumble through the task itself, typing in numbers without fully understanding the consequences of his choices, and setting aside or struggling through his uncertainty. He might even be happy with the outcome, though at the moment of performing the task, he would be clueless as to what that might be.

Could the sophisticated user accomplish his task using a detailed interface? Almost certainly. He might complain about the clutter, but unless the design is really poor, it shouldn't get in his way or slow him down, and the excess detail provided would at best be a minor nuisance, at worst an insult to his intelligence that would lead him to wonder if he was working with the right kind of firm.

And specific to this example, setting up a 401K is something that many people do - even people with very little knowledge or conceptual ability. As such, the designer must accommodate users with a broad range of investment knowledge. Other examples might be drawn from products where the user is presumed to closer to the extremes of inexperience (buying an annuity) or experience (using derivatives to collar an equity) ... or even from outside the realm of financial services (contrast the knowledge of the person who buys a t-shirt versus one who buys a spectrometer).

Getting back to the point, one of he fundamental considerations of user experience design is: how dumb is your user? Overestimate his intelligence, and you risk alienating those with less; underestimate it, and you risk alienating those with more.

Where, by the nature of the transaction, we can predict that users will be skewed to one side or the other of intelligence, imagination, creativity, sophistication, experience, etc. the design choices become clear. Where a product has a broader appeal, there is a consideration of how much elaboration the user will need to get through it - there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and any attempt to be all-encompassing is at best a weak compromise.