How I Design — For the Forgetful Mind
When was the last time you forgot your password? When was the last time you forgot to buy an item from the list in your head? And when was the last time you entered a room to do something and immediately forgot what you were there for? I can confidently say that every single one of us has been in the above situations more than once in our life. *Totally guilty*
Great Design means an Effortless Experience.
A good design is where you don’t have to try so hard to memorize something and then later, try even harder to remember the same thing (but, oh well, you already forgot it!). The stress of forgetting something actually made you forget the very thing (Love the irony!). There are three obvious points of mental strain here — memorizing, remembering, and frustration that ruin the overall user experience. Clever design helps you solve these problems by taking it easy on your brain, and it does so by making the system do it for you instead. There are plenty of examples for the same all around us. And this time, I will give my favorite company, Netflix, a tiny break and will pick two major essential services delivery companies — Swiggy and BigBasket — who have mastered the art of reducing the cognitive strain for the user to create an end-to-end seamless experience.
Swiggy — Logging into Swiggy doesn’t need a conventional password and instead uses an OTP to get the user started in only 2 clicks. This not only helps you in not having to set a password to later end up clicking ‘Forgot password?’ every time you try to log in to the app, but also helps with better authentication without compromising on the security. So, irrespective of how many devices you are using, you are in a conventional-password-free world. No more remembering numbers, special characters, and the numerous hit-and-trials of the various combinations of that one default password before you place your order. Hence, Swiggy gives you — 2 clicks, 2 words — Win-Win!
BigBasket — This is another great example of effortless design. When ordering from BigBasket, at the checkout, they have a section called ‘Did you forget?’. Want to know the brilliance of it? It lists the items you had previously ordered and also shows a date that it was last ordered to help you evaluate if you need to add it to your basket without having to get up from your cozy couch, walk to the kitchen, and check your refrigerator. Ugh! too much effort, Let me be lazy! Now here, we have physical and mental effort saved - a double win!
What did Swiggy and BigBasket solve in the above examples? Swiggy completely eliminated the need to set a password (with a ton of rules with all the keys on the keyboard) and then memorize it for the future. BigBasket helped remind you of the list of the things that you might have forgotten by giving you a preview of the previous orders with the order dates to make a smart decision. All these examples are subtle and yet are extremely efficient in improving your overall experience.
Just to see how important memory is and how mental strain affects us in our everyday life, let’s play a tiny game. Below is a list of random things. Now take a few seconds to go through the list and try to memorize as many as possible.
- Now close your eyes and try to list as many as you can remember. No cheating! How many did you get? Note it down.
- Now look at the list below and try to identify the items you saw above. How many did you get this time? Note this down too.
How many of those items did you get right in both questions? Is the second number bigger than the first?
The First method is called Remembering, where you have a blank slate with no anchor, and you try to go back in your mind to see what all you have stored in your brain. The second method is called Recall, where you have a hint or context to compare to the list of things stored in your brain. Remembering involves building the context first before listing the memorized items and hence requires a bit more energy than Recall. Hence, for the majority of us, we were able to list more things in the method of recall than the method of remembering.
This principle is used in design everywhere around us, to improve the experience by reducing the cognitive strain (mental effort) for the user. So, from the above BigBasket example, which of the two principles — recall and remember — is used?
Cognitive strain can be reduced in the following ways:
- Eliminating the user effort of memorization wherever possible by making the system remember things instead of the user. The chrome password manager does the same.
- Eliminating the user effort of remembering/recall. BigBasket is the best example of this.
- Providing context wherever necessary which acts as an anchor for the user. The checkout page for Swiggy is a great example here.
The reduced mental effort helps create a seamless experience and greater customer satisfaction. Isn’t that what design is all about?
So, here’s a fun little additional example:
Have you ever wondered why multiple apps ask for permission to read your messages? This is to improve your experience by saving you the effort of having to memorize first and later remember the OTP every time you place an order. This saves you a lot of mental effort and also the physical effort of typing the OTP. The lazy me gets a win, yet again! *Secretly giggling!*
Happy Learning!
