Human brain is not lazy

We sometimes (more than sometimes) think users are very lazy, or maybe even dumb! But UX research and real-world examples provide evidence that users are not totally lazy, it’s just our brain evolved to do that. User are simply rational actors trying to achieve their goals with minimal effort and cognitive load.

You may find yourself in an user usability test and think they need to scroll little bit more, or read those text a little longer to fully understand your design. Why they didn’t find the right way to do things?

Instead of acusing the users, try to understand the reasons behind their actions so we can create designs that align with natural human behavior. These are few common behaviours that make user seem being lazy but in fact, they are being efficient.

1. Device Inertia

Kara and her fiancé were sitting on the couch in the living room, they were both using their phone browsing the web for new flooring options. And they meet few pain points:

Couldn’t see the detail of the floor well
Can’t set filters as the way the wanted
Trouble comparing multiple choices in one window

Even though they acknowledge those issues but each time they face them, Kara would say to Steve “We should go do this on the computer” and continue to swipe on a 3-inch iPhone screen. While there are 2 fully-charged tablets lying on table a mere few feet away and 2 fast laptops attached to 32-inch monitors sat only two rooms away.

And then we have the term Device Inertia, it occurs when multiple devices are accesible to the user but they continue to use the device in which they are currently working, even if a different device is potentially much better suited for the task at hand

The main reason behind device inertia is, as mentioned before, that the perceived cost is too high compared with perceived benefit. The perceived benefit of switching to a bigger screen is being able to see larger pictures and make better comparisons. But the perceived cost is going to a different device, navigating to the desired site, and redoing the search on that device, an effort that seems daunting to users suffering from device inertia.

If the user made an explicit calculation of time and effort spent versus what would be saved, then the comparison would come out in favor of moving to the optimal device in all those cases where a fair amount of additional usage were to happen. But the calculation would come out in favor of continuing to use the current device if there was only one more interaction left. Most human beings have an extraordinarily short planning horizon. As long as people keep operating on their intuition, their natural behaviour is to look only one step ahead, and thus, stick with the current device.

Mobile phones and computers are obvious competitors, but there are many other opportunities for device inertia. For my instance, I was using Google Sheet to calculate numbers that spreaded in a wide range of rows and columns. I have to input numbers in multiple boxes and each time I want to move my active box to another location, I would use arrow buttons repeatedly on my keyboard to navigate around. Even though I know for sure that using my mouse would give me more precise selection and help me navigate more freely (preceived benefit). But I choose to tap tap tap my way through the arrow keys because my hands were already on the keyboard and the work to switch devices seemed higher than just staying (preceived cost).

And device inertia is not just limited to digital or technology. Can you find some example of Device Inertia?

Examples

Use the same chopsticks used for frying fish and beat the egg instead of using the egg whisk hanging on the cupboard
Working on a job that is not good enough but don’t want to find a new job because it would take more effort (just an example, chill)

2. Momentum Behaviour

When I was a sophomore at college, we had to make presentation of our final exam. It was a month worth of work so there were a lot of content that we need to put into the presentation. I was the content writer and my friend was the slide designer. I recommended her to change the background of the slide and add some artworks in the back. Everything were already features in the software, but my friend found different, she decided to go extra miles.

Rather than change slide background to an image with the artwork, she changed the background and added the artworks to each slide, slide by slide. Back and forth back and forth till she reached the end of the slide. This method was flawed in that it didn’t bring the best output that the software could deliver and took more user’s effort and time to complete than the optimal path with the UI would have taken.

For the record, my friend is a smart person and I don’t think she is lazy. Yet she amazed me with a method that she discovered by herself because:

She found that method first
She didn’t acknowledge that the software already have an easier way to complete the task
The method and result is good enough

The author of the research wrote

Momentum behavior occurs when people look at but do not choose an option that could help them because they have already selected a course and are sticking to it. Even within moments, users can become loyal to the route they have chosen and oblivious to other interface elements.

Momentum behavior happens when parts of the interface are not strong enough to call to users when they need them. In other words, a name, style, or placement is not enough to draw people to the path they should take. Another cause of momentum behavior is the fact that people don’t always look for the most direct route — they’ll follow what we call an inferior path just to get their task done, even if it ends up being the scenic route. If it does occur to them that there may be a better route, they feel that either they won’t find it or it will take too long to try.

Momentum behavior reflects another instance of low perceived benefit versus high perceived cost. In this situation, users find that taking the time to explore the interface and learn a new procedure (that is, the perceived cost) far outweighs saving a few seconds over the procedure that they’ve already learned.

3. Tunnel Vision and Selective Attention

Sometimes people could overlook something that’s right there on the screen.

User don’t look around much. They often stay highly focus on the screen section that they’re engaging with or that they assume contains the answer to their problem.

The author saw a clear example of this user tunnel vision in Australia, when they tested users in Sydney on the corporate website of Westfield, a retail property developer. One user was trying to find out when Westfield entered the U.K. market and carefully stepped through the timeline in the company’s history section.

Each event in the company’s history was shown in a lightbox-style pop-up. Although this was perhaps an overly aggressive design choice, it certainly worked. Users easily navigated the timeline by clicking the various controls (which I’m not showing here, because they don’t matter for the topic at hand).

Each entry was nicely designed, with the year, an attractive photo, a reasonably well-written headline, and a short summary of that year’s major events.

The answer to the user’s problem — the year Westfield entered the U.K. — seems quite prominent in this design: “2000” sits in the upper left of the box in a larger font size than the other information.

And? The design didn’t work. The user read through the entire body text before finding the year in the last line. She didn’t see the year at the upper left. Tunnel vision, as stated.

The solution to tunnel vision usability problems is to position related items close together. Here’s a quick example of how this might be done in their example:

This design is also better for accessibility. Low-vision users who employ a screen magnifier to blow up a small section of the screen are much more likely to understand the information when it’s all in one place.

Tunnel vision in human behavior refers to the phenomenon where an individual’s attention becomes so focused on a specific task, goal, or object that they lose awareness of their surroundings and other important stimuli. It’s like looking through a tunnel, where the peripheral vision is obscured, limiting the ability to perceive the broader context.

Positive effects:

Enhanced focus and concentration: Tunnel vision can help us filter out distractions and dedicate all our cognitive resources to the task at hand, leading to increased productivity and efficiency.
Improved performance: By narrowing our focus, we can achieve greater precision and accuracy in tasks that require meticulous attention to detail.
Increased motivation and determination: Tunnel vision can fuel our drive and perseverance when pursuing a specific goal, motivating us to push through challenges and obstacles.

Negative Effects:

Limited awareness: When attention is focused on a single point, it becomes difficult to notice important information that lies outside the immediate focus. This can lead to missed opportunities, oversights, and poor decision-making.
Reduced flexibility and adaptability: Tunnel vision can make individuals less receptive to new information and perspectives, hindering their ability to adjust to changing circumstances and adapt to unforeseen challenges.
Increased stress and anxiety: The intense focus associated with tunnel vision can also lead to elevated stress levels and anxiety, especially when faced with pressure or deadlines.

Example

Drivers on a busy highway: The driver focuses solely on the road ahead, neglecting surrounding traffic and potential hazards.

Selective Attention

Selective attention is a long-known human behavior in which people focus on a particular object and ignore other information that they perceive to be irrelevant. For example, imagine you are in a noisy restaurant where the tables are positioned very close to one another. You can clearly hear the conversations at adjacent tables, but you select to tune them out and listen specifically to your dinner companion. Or you are checking the weather in an app on your phone and purposefully look away from the animated advertisement and focus on the temperature and images of the sun and clouds.

Depending on the design, the situation, the individual user, and the past experience, certain elements on the screen (sometimes useful, sometimes useless) may get ignored. So selective attention may help or hurt users.

Imagine a user is reading the news on a news site. She’s very focused on the story and doesn’t look at the navigation at the top at all. Ignoring the navigation doesn’t hurt the user in this scenario because she doesn’t need to go anywhere else. But this same user, who was very engaged with the topic and wants to read more, is so focused on the More from This Author information at the end of the article that she doesn’t see the Related Links that appear at the bottom of the page. This last situation is an example where selective attention hurts the user.

Selective attention is also the result of a cost–benefit analysis, although this one is more ingrained in human nature and probably dictated by evolution. Every moment humans are flooded with stimuli, and it would be highly inefficient to pay attention to every one of them. Humans have learned to pay attention first and foremost to the important stimuli and ignore stimuli that were proven less menacing or interesting by prior encounters.

On the web, our prior experience has taught us that banners, navigation menus, search often appear at the top of pages. As a result, we tend to ignore banners and anything that looks like advertisements, unless we are specifically looking for deals or suggestions, and focus on the region where we expect the content to be.

Example

Focusing on a conversation in a noisy environment: When you’re having a conversation in a crowded restaurant, you can selectively focus on the other person’s voice while filtering out the background noise. This allows you to follow the conversation without getting overwhelmed by the surrounding sounds.
Playing a video game: In a fast-paced video game, you must selectively focus on the essential elements like your character, enemies, and objectives while ignoring background details or non-essential information. This allows you to react quickly and make informed decisions during gameplay.

4. Solution for designers

Make important tasks, if not all tasks, easy on any device. Research the most common devices used and focus on these.
Do not assume that users will actively switch from phone to tablet or computer to do particular tasks.
Allow users to easily sync information across different platforms, so people eventually learn that tasks started on a phone can be easily resumed on the desktop, without a lot of redundant work.
Through behavioral research and analytics, study the most common paths people take to complete tasks. If the best one is not the most commonly taken, work to make it more discoverable, findable, and usable.
Refrain from making important UI elements look like advertisements or like content that people have learned to ignore.

Above all, try to find the best design solution instead of just labeling the user as lazy. Human evolution has taken a million years to produce the users we have, so they are not likely to abruptly change the way they devote mental resources just because they are dealing with your app or website.

Info

I want to thank these authors for their work:

Kara Pernice on Why Designers Think Users Are Lazy: 3 Human Behaviors
Jakob Nielsen on Tunnel Vision and Selective Attention
Bard - bard.google.com
Interaction Design Foundation - interaction-design.org

For further reading: