I’ve been thinking about design lately, as I’ve been working closely with User Experience Designers at work, helping to optimize the candidate experience for our job search (& apply) web application, and also for my personal projects and personal consumption of various digital products. One thing I do not understand is the near-ubiquitous “confirmation bias” that User Interface Designers have.
What I mean by “confirmation bias” here (a pun and not the popular academic phrase) is the tendency for designers to add frequent and unnecessary confirmation messages. To always show a confirmation question is like punishing users for taking the correct action.
For example, when I want to access any program from inside the Nintendo Wii menu, it asks me “Are you sure you want to load?” which is quite annoying, since it has the prompt every time and I just want it to start loading the application (e.g., Netflix), not question me.
Although it is somewhat easy to select the wrong option on the Wii (if one is not used to the pointer control), this design decision still makes little sense as there’s insignificant consequence for selecting the wrong option (OK, so it loads the wrong app/game and I have to wait a minute before being able to return to home screen, so what?) and the consequence for selecting the correct option is an extra step, which gets tiresome after 50+ times.
I think no confirmation message should ever be used unless the consequence to the user of selecting the wrong option is severe (e.g., deleting my entire user account). If the consequence of the wrong action is a minor inconvenience to the user, why would you choose to inflict minor inconvenience to users for choosing the correct action??
I understand that accidentally clicking the wrong thing can be a little frustrating, but if that’s of concern for your particular function, why not provide an Undo option in that case, so users who make the mistake can easily fix it rather than forcing all users to “confirm”?
Likewise account preferences should be stored and set at the user profile and not asked for every single session. Netflix, I’m looking at you – your “adults vs. kids” choice is ridiculous, not only would this info be better stored at the user profile (so people without kids can bypass this message) but it’s also hopelessly naive – any kid capable of operating a remote control can figure out how to go back and select the “adults” option. Netflix should have better parent/child options (set at user profile level and with some passcode for adults if they’re sharing the account with kids).
While I am grateful that the smartphone and apps have ushered in a new age of more intelligent design, I hope we can overcome this unnecessary handholding and let users who flow through the “happy path” have the most streamlined and confirmation-free experience possible. 🙂
