Building less flexibly for better usability

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My first job was at an interior design firm helping them do data analysis. As a kid fresh out of grad school, I had no idea what I was doing but set about doing my best being helpful doing computer-y things while being surrounded by literal architects and designers doing cool stuff that I could barely follow.

In that brief year I worked there before everything imploded in the 2008 crash, one of the architects commented on how buildings are fascinating things in that they were designed and built to serve some immediate purpose, but over a century later, different people come in and reimagine the same physical space for completely unimagined purposes. There's a very interesting interplay between the intent of the architect and the intent of the actual occupants.

For example, take the home you live in right now. There's obviously a bathroom space, a food preparation space, and then spaces that we nominally think of as "bedrooms", "closets", "living rooms". All these rooms are arranged on the floorplan according to a certain amount of logic and practical necessity for where structural members, pipes, wires and other mechanicals need to be routed. All that stuff is imagined by whoever designed the house before the first piece of wood was nailed together.

And sometimes, those designs don't work out. That closet door that opens at an awkward angle. The kitchen cabinet door that blocks another cabinet door. That weird mystery switch that doesn't seem to do anything. The awkward room where there's just no reasonable place to put a bed or a TV. But whether things work out or not, someone at least thought enough to have it included in the final design to build. Whoever got to first use it after construction hopefully made use of it as originally intended.

But how many of us have repurposed a bedroom to become an office with furniture change? How many buildings pre-existed electrical wiring, air conditioning and later had all these features retrofitted in? Most of us have no idea who designed our living and working spaces, and we surely do not have any knowledge of what intent the original designer had. As users of a space, we approach things completely differently. We don't care what the original intent was. When we live or work in a new space, we are instead asking ourselves – to what extent to we have to bend our lives to the space, and to what extent can we bend the space to our lives? It takes external enforcement in the form of building codes, zoning laws, historical preservation boards and homeowners associations to provide pressure to stop people from modifying structures to suit whatever whims they have at the moment.

It's tangential to the topic but I do want to briefly acknowledge that a lot of the rules imposed by things like zoning laws often have unsavory racial/socioeconomic motivations and not related to safety or "good design". So they're not examples of anything inherently good, just a mechanism that society has developed.

Another interesting thing about spaces is that if you imagine the spectrum of "highly specialized" on one end, like the main area of a place of worship, that can't be easily repurposed to another use. On the other end of the spectrum would be a big empty warehouse space where the interior can be infinitely rearranged with new semi-permanent walls added as desired.

But how many people want to or work in a giant blank canvas? Most people don't have nearly the experience and visualization skills to look at an empty space and imagine how to use it. When I did my kitchen renovation, I went through dozens of sheets of graph paper and hours of visualizing the space to come up with a layout that even functioned after moving a bunch of things.

Prior to that experience, it was much easier to use a room "as intended" . We're the sort of folk that shove all the furniture onto the edges of any room and leave an empty void in the middle. Most people want the guidance afforded to us by the various cues built into a space. Those cues, leftover shelves on a wall, the placement of a vent, outlet, rug, or even a door, are essentially the built up opinions of the original designer and anyone else that used the space before. Those ideas may not be the absolute best use of a given space, but they're at least a sign of something that had worked for someone in the past. That sort of signal has some weight to it.

Anyways, this story has a couple of actually useful points to it.

First, now's a good time as any to take a pause and look around and ask yourself if the space you're in can use a shuffle. Sometimes just moving things around can make a huge difference. Prior to moving, we kept the same layout to our living room for over 10 years and while it was pretty garbage, we never did anything about it out of laziness. I regret that.

Second, I often think about this when I'm working to design software and data systems. It comes up a huge amount when working with engineers who make software for other users because their first instinct is to build and provide a giant box of Lego pieces for users to freely rearrange to suit their needs. I've seen this in school projects and companies of twenty employees, let alone megacorps that should know better. It's often the job of the UX team to remind them that users don't see the world in the same way and will be completely lost and discouraged when handed an API without any guidance.

Just like with spaces, the number of people who can envision how to use a tool without some opinionated guidance and inspiration is vanishingly low. It's on us as advocates for usability to remind people that "obvious use cases and implementations" are never obvious. It's why we keep hearing from users that "we need better documentation", not because they're too stupid to understand the API reference, but because they can't see how things can be put together to create the effect they're looking for in the first place.

The same admonishment actually goes for US too because we design data systems for other people an we, too, often fall into the trap of building a box of Lego blocks for other people to piece together instead of creating some magical functions that "make a bunch of assumptions to do one job really nicely". The temptation is always to shove the responsibility for using the tool closer towards the user because it's easier for us. Just like it'd be easier for architects throughout history to just build big empty warehouses and let people figure it out for themselves.

Yes, it's hard to talk to users and do research and analysis to figure out what things people actually want to do with a given software solution. This is especially true for the sorts of projects data folk typically do which are zero-budget work on top of our existing workloads. But it's the only way to make stuff that other people want to use. There's a TON of value in taking part of the significant mental workload needed to make things work, whether it is for physical spaces or software. Sure, that removes possibilities for novel rearrangements, but those won't happen without interested users anyway.

People quite literally pay more for products that are easier to use, and most will just flat out not use something that makes their brain hurt, even if it doesn't cost them anything else to use it otherwise.

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About this newsletter

I’m Randy Au, Quantitative UX researcher, former data analyst, and general-purpose data and tech nerd. Counting Stuff is a weekly newsletter about the less-than-sexy aspects of data science, UX research and tech. With some excursions into other fun topics.

All photos/drawings used are taken/created by Randy unless otherwise credited.

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