Universal Principles of UX

89

Don’t ask for unnecessary things.

When I was working at Fantasy Interactive in the 2000s, the founder always used to say that users have three battery cells when it comes to making decisions. They’re willing to make one decision and then another, but don’t make them choose again after a third option or they’re likely to just give up.

We know from usability studies that decision fatigue is a real thing. The more choices we present to a user, the more likely it is that they will abandon whatever it is they’re doing (see Principle 24). And that’s where defaults come in. When we pre-select things for a user, we minimize the number of decisions they have to make, helping them save time reading or typing, while also making it less likely they’ll ...