I have seen the future of design. It is bite-sized, delicious and satisfying. 

Snackable Design is the present and the future. Most products need to be snackable now. In the near future, things which aren’t snackable will be replaced by things that are.

I start UX design at the highest level: Reframing problems to be simpler before designing solutions to those problems. However, UX is about the little details as well as the big picture. This article is about important details that should not be left to graphic designers & devs. To paraphrase Mufasa from the Lion King, everything the light touches is our concern.

Senior designers incorporate advanced strategies like Design Thinking & Habit Design, but it can get a bit utopian. However, Snackable Design is all about the pragmatic details that make a design work. 

The traps of Utopian Design

The problem I see almost everywhere is what I call utopian design. Let’s define terms. Utopian doesn’t mean ‘good’ or ‘great’. It means unrealistically perfect. The origin of the word relates to ‘no place’ in the book ‘Utopia’ by Thomas More. When designers and developers are surprised that users bail before completing tasks on sites and apps, they have usually fallen into utopian traps:

1. The belief that, if we design it perfectly, everyone will love it, and we’ll be successful.
2. Users are very motivated to use our site and will figure it out.
3. Even if it’s long-winded, users have nothing better to do, no distractions and perfect internet connections.
4. Even if it’s hard to use, we can fix it with documentation and training.

As in the satirical origin, the utopian idea is that we’d have perfect results if only people were different. That’s a nice idea if you get a remote design job for aliens on another planet! On Earth, people are what they are, and it’s increasingly non-ideal for users of complex designs. There is no such thing as a perfect design or perfect users. There are good designs that work for real users.

The Attention Economy

We live in a focus-starved society. People are too busy with distractions everywhere in their home and work lives. A while back, a prescient colleague said “I’m dating my phone,” because she never went anywhere without her phone. It’s worse now. People obsessively cling to their phones like crazy stalkers. You see it everywhere. People check facebook, twitter and instagram when crossing busy streets, or obsessively check work email and slack 15-25 times a day. A group of 6 waiting to order at a restaurant sits glued to their phones instead of interacting with each other or just waiting. ADD used to be a condition; now it’s a lifestyle choice for “normal” people. People could sit with their own thoughts or look at the world around them, but generally, they don’t. As designers, there’s no point ranting about users’ lack of attention. We must deal with reality as it is.

Design for Reality, Not Utopia

Our users don’t live in Utopia. The constant threat of interruptions is reality for most users, most of the time. Many sites and apps fail, because they require a user to sit down and focus on a tedious multi-step process that falls apart if the user is pulled away by email, a messaging conversation or the internet connection is broken. Users particularly hate unexpectedly long-winded processes: when booking a flight takes 15-20 minutes, or when a site forces you to create an account before purchasing.

Busy people are mentally and physically disabled

Designing for genuinely disabled people is no longer harder than for “normal” people. People do not pay exclusive attention to anything for long periods of time. Load down an intelligent, charming, optimistic person with work responsibilities, kids that have to be fed and taken to school, ballet and soccer. Add in a long work commute, insufficient time for sleeping and eating, and you get someone who is easily annoyed, has a hard time focusing and is physically unable to sit and do one thing at a time.  Younger people with less responsibilities are even worse.

Say you are designing a consumer facing app aimed at the lucrative 18-32 market with disposable income. Young men don’t single task. They use their phones while playing a game on a tablet and watching a movie on Netflix. Young women text and instagram while carrying on conversations with their girlfriends, sometimes in loud bars, house parties, or the washroom. Not everyone and certainly not you, kind reader, but many young and old users will text and drive, or facebook while shuffling across the street.

I know what you’re thinking. Hey, I don’t have these problems if I design enterprise apps for business users. You’re not off the hook. Ever heard of open offices? Hardly anyone works in private offices with four walls. There’s chatter, people moving around, and people coming up and interrupting you any old time. Aside from that, there’s a constant stream of email, texts, and Slack that will find you and interrupt you wherever you go.  

Make your design snackable

Regardless of what you are designing or the target market, making your design snackable is the way to overcome the traps of Utopian Design. What is a Snackable Design? In general, snackable designs are much more successful because the task flow is carved into bite-sized parts that are easy on user’s brains, even in distracted environments where connections fail. Snackable design is a framework which accepts that users are focus-starved and allows them to easily accomplish tasks even if constantly interrupted. It combines big picture planning with attention to details. A couple of examples will illustrate this best.

Exhibit B for BAD: Unexpectedly tedious

The worst thing to do is to turn an inherently simple task into a long-winded slog. Case in point: booking movie tickets online. A national theatre chain has an app to book tickets. Should be simple, right? Instead, it forces users through 6 long-winded screens and 5-10 minutes while a countdown timer threatens to cancel the whole thing. The first fail is where they interrupt the thought  ‘I want to see a movie’ by forcing account creation first, which is compounded by overly complex password rules that are proven to lower real security. But that’s another topic discussed elsewhere. Neither the app nor it’s website remember the password if you’ve entered it before, so it’s a tedious mess before you’ve done anything. Then it won’t show what’s playing until you input what you want to see, when you want to see it and which theatre. What if I want to see what I can get before I decide what I want?

The problem is not just that the process has 6 screens;  You CANNOT fix anything by putting tons of UI on one screen. Each of those 6 screens was incredibly dense with needlessly long text. It has to be scrolled damn near forever to get to the button near, but not at, the bottom to proceed. It was also fragile. Errors & missed data aren’t outlined in red and focus is not brought to them, even though they block progress through the flow. It’s like the whole thing is daring you to get through it before the timeout cancels the whole thing. Getting a tax audit or a root canal would be less painful!

Exhibit A for AWESOME: Unexpectedly snackable

The best thing to do is design something to be concise, flexible, and proactively helpful. Case in point: Ordering a tablet case. When I got a tablet and pen for sketching and note-taking, I needed a case. I did not know what my options were in protection, convenience, materials and looks. I found a site that sold cases and entered my specific tablet into their search box. Since it was a new tablet, there were only a few cases specifically for it, but their site was smart enough to recommend a series of cases for other tablets that were compatible. That’s smart and handy.

Before I could do much more, I got a work call which distracted me and then I responded to an email and slack message stream. Work discussions led to me restarting my browser.

When I finally went back to the site looking for tablet cases, I assumed I would be starting from scratch because I hadn’t created an account. Instead, the site recognized that I had been there before and a message invited me to continue where I left off. That was cool. The search UI had a filter that allowed me to prioritize certain features to get a good shortlist. The text was concise and easy to consume so I wasn’t overwhelmed with details. Within two minutes, I had found right product from an initial list of a hundred. The payment page offered discounts on related accessories. I added an inexpensive charging dock that I was going to need. Totally effortless: the store got a bigger sale and the consumer (me) got a better, more valuable service. 

Then my power went out for a couple seconds. My internet connection was lost, but I thought, ‘this only took a couple minutes, so I’ll just do it again’. Amazingly, the site had saved my progress and took me right back to the cart, so I could just pay for it. Thirty seconds later, I was done with a satisfying completion message indicating arrival date. At the end, it offered to create a user account to automate my next order. I clicked yes, and I was immediately done, because I’d already entered all the required information. If only everything were this easy!

8 Steps to make any task snackable

To summarize, do not design a task flow like the user is constructing a 7 course meal. Never demand that users sit, focus and remember what they’ve already done. Plan for graceful crash recovery. Some processes have a lot of steps and some things like a tax filing are complex or long. Any flow, process, or UI can benefit from becoming more snackable. Read through exhibit A above again.

The 8 Rules of Snackable Design

Snackability is a particular way of following long-standing UX rules.

1. Save progress as you go. Let users resume if they come back to an unfinished flow. Design an automated and effortless way to resume any unfinished flow. Yes, it takes work, but it can be a game changer in customer experience.
2. Be forgiving & helpful with all extreme errors, like internet failure in the middle of a flow. Anticipate every disaster and design to mitigate them.
3. Be flexible with how users start a thing. Don’t require a mandatory set of inputs when users could plausibly start with less, or even one input. 
4. Make small asks. Strip each step down to the essentials. Low cognitive load feels easy. If you must have more steps to make each one easy, group them into sections.
5. Offer intelligent search results & quick, client-side filters to narrow results. The key is ‘intelligent’ results including fuzzy matches.
6. Chop down your copy and micro-copy. The design should imply what users should do. Buttons should be verbs that indicate what will happen. A lot of text telling people what to do is a sign that the design is too complex.
7. Automate account creation. Once a user has entered a lot of information, offer to make an account so that they never have to enter all that crap again. The key is to ask after the user already entered all or most of the information (such as after an order). Then they can just confirm and, like magic, they have an account!
8. Test snackability. Test usability under adverse conditions, with adverse users with competing distractions, broken connections. I will detail “adverse testing” in another article. It’s a fun combat sport.

Summary: Make the smallest ask possible

The question for designers to ponder is ‘How big is the ask that my design is making of users?’ A colleague and I came up with a useful saying: ‘Everything in life that’s really a thing is a metaphor for sex.’ It has applied to every design problem I’ve ever faced. For example, asking a user to sit down, eliminate all distractions, provide personal information to create an account, and then focus on one thing they aren’t all that excited about is a huge ask. It’s like approaching a stranger in a bar and proposing that you have sex, live together and open a joint bank account. It sounds ridiculous, but so are the painful attention demands of many sites and apps.

Most products would be more more usable if they were more snackable.

Heavy, unsnackable products will be replaced by alternatives that are.

Small Asks

Make small asks of users. Choosing from a few clear choices is a small ask.  Once a user chooses something, the flow either presents a) a series of small asks as a snackable design flow or b)  the huge ask of paying close attention to a long-winded, fragile and annoying flow. Make small asks at every step in a flow and both users and the people paying you will love your design.

I was inspired to conceive of Snackable Design by re-reading classics like Steve Krug, Daniel Kahneman, and most directly on point, Susan Weinschenk’s book, 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People. Susan’s book is the most snackable; open any random page for actionable nuggets of content that can enrich your approach to design.

Here’s my small ask. If you enjoyed this article, share it with others!
Contact me if you need a great Product Design Director/Manager.