User is drunk

Australian designer Will Dabel offers an interesting metaphor to help develop simple and convenient interfaces. It is very difficult for a developer who knows his system far and wide and devotes a significant part of his life to working on it to work out how an ordinary user with his head clogged with other things will work with it. Especially if he tries his product for the first time in his life and is not yet sure of its usefulness. To present what is going on in the user's head, Will Dabel suggests imagining that the user is drunk. His attention is distracted, he easily loses his temper, he does not see very clearly and does not move very confidently - if you constantly remember this, the interface will be cleaner and simpler. The essence of the Dable method is described in this five-minute video:



Key points of the method:

• A drunk person sees everything blurry, so you need to make sure that the main function of the page is clearly visible and completely understandable. You can even take a screenshot and blur it specially so that small text is not readable - if it is still clear what is required of the user - the interface is good.
• He has distracted attention. If he needs a somewhat complicated sequence of actions, he needs to be literally led through her hand - first X, then Y, and only then Z - and not interfere with everything in a heap.
• Repeat twice. Important and dangerous actions should be accompanied by warnings and reminders, something like this: “You are about to delete the object X ... You have just deleted the object X”
• A drunk person is easily annoyed. For your site, this may mean that if something does not work out, the user can just spit on everything and close the tab. Put someone to test the interface and carefully observe in which places the person begins to show signs of irritation - they definitely need to be worked on.
• Last, but perhaps most important, the user is drunk, but not stupid. A person with IQ 160, even after getting drunk, still has IQ 160. No need to hold the user for an idiot, simplify everything to impossibility, obsessively explain every little thing. It is necessary to respect his experience and knowledge.