Don't derail the train

Overloading users with complexity in product design can derail their journey. The goal is to avoid cognitive overload by using progressive disclosure. Start simple, then reveal advanced features as needed

Key guidelines:
- Strip away non-essentials: keep primary screens clean.
- Gradually unveil complexity: introduce advanced use cases step by step.
- Guide the journey: build user confidence through above principles.

Remember, exceptions exist: some products, like trading software, require more complexity. But as a rule, we tend to try to do too much within our interfaces. If a flow takes longer, but the overall understandability of the screens is improved, it is better UX. There's a reason a guest checkout flow isn't completed in a single step.

The Empathy Gap

You can never truly imagine all the ways a user interacts with your product. This is due to what we call the empathy gap: it’s a bias where we aren’t fully able to predict someone’s feelings, thoughts and behaviours. So how do you fix this?

First, understand why this exists: we stand too close to the product, knowing its assumptions. Users have different contexts, levels of expertise or expectations that are not necessarily aligned with your team.

Next, look at what stage you’re in the product development cycle and attempt to close the empathy gap:

• Are you in the early stages? Use circumstantial research such as interviews, diary studies, …

• Are you in the late stages? Shift to validation research: think of usability testing, tree testing, heuristic evaluation, …

• Are you post-launch? Continuously observe real-world usage with tools like Smartlook to surprise yourself in the behavioural patterns.

You can never close the gap 100%, but you can avoid mistakes that in hindsight are obvlious.

Use Your Product as a Customer

Tip for anyone in product & design: always use your own product the way your customers do. I don't mean a quick functional test– I mean a real user scenario from start to finish.

Case in point: I suspect the team at HubSpot has never really tried to send an email to a non-marketing contact in their own product. There's so many UX hurdles with just a few quick fixes. Sure, it works functionally, but at significant friction & frustration.

Functional acceptance isn't a acceptable UX, no matter what the 'user story' or 'roadmap' says. The best product work done as a team is by literally walking in the users shoes. How often do we truly use the products we build as a user, and not as a builder? I'm plenty guilty of it.