In much the same way that special teams can quickly improve a football team, Defensive Design can quickly make a big difference in user trust and retention by taking control of decisive, transitional moments others may overlook.
Moments of Transition
It’s said that to have a better overall listening experience in your home entertainment, your biggest bang for your buck will happen when you focus & spend your money in those areas where the signal transitions from one format to another (music storage system >> electronics >> sound waves)
- Turntable
- Speakers
- Headphones
By the same token, I think you can do much to improve mobile app or web experiences by focusing on those critical moments when users transition from one activity to another.
Offensive Design Choice – the Heavy-Handed Onboarding Flow
Frequently, you’ll see coach marks or a tutorial as first-time users try to start using an app.
The idea is certainly logical, but these approaches tend to get in the way of the user’s intent. They just want to get started using the app, poking around, and accomplishing their goal.
If you need to put a whole tutorial on how to use your app, chances are, your app will not be used that much.
At least make it so they can be easily dismissed, or only appear for the first few times.
The Defensive Design Prescription – Prepare the User’s Experience with Care
In the same way that most reviews are written based on negative experiences, get ahead of your users with defensive design and put a plan in place to step up in the decisive transitional moments.
- Onboarding – How simple can you make it? Can you resist the marketing team’s desire to capture more analytics?
- Registration – Can you use social login? Make it clear this is separate from sharing to the service
- Calls to Action – Don’t keep the user guessing about how to accomplish their goals on any given screen, or at every interaction fork in the road. Make it unambiguous.
Spend the lion’s share of your time thinking through critical user goals and intent. Create cushions through established patterns and quick safety release valves. Allow the user to recover easily and quickly.
Defensive Design means we’re taking care of what our users need to make things right for them up front, instead of trying to play catch-up, trying to fix broken trust for the rest of the experience.