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"Simple can be harder than complex." - Steve Jobs
The best products are simple to use and make our lives better. Quarantining complexity is how you get there. It means shifting the responsibility of making decisions away from the user and onto the code. It takes experienced designers and developers, a strategic process, and a willingness to sweat the small stuff without losing sight of the big picture.
What Is Quarantining Complexity in UX Design?
Quarantining complexity means hiding the hard stuff from users. Instead of asking them to navigate tricky decisions, configurations, or edge cases, you absorb that complexity into the design and code so the experience feels effortless on the surface.
It is one of the most valuable traits a software product can have, and one of the hardest to achieve.
Take notifications. Almost every tool uses them. They seem like a no-brainer ("Just send an email! Add a push notification!"), but factor in multiple devices, user types, flows, formats, and a seemingly endless list of other considerations, and this "basic" feature gets complicated fast.
Slack recognized this and designed a smart system to manage it. To users, it feels effortless. They just get the right notifications, in the right place, at the right time. Behind the scenes, it is anything but simple. Slack's engineering team mapped out a detailed decision tree to determine whether and how to notify a user about a single message.
That attention to detail and ability to quarantine complexity helped Slack set a record as the fastest-ever startup to reach a $1 billion valuation. It also earned them millions of active, loyal users and hundreds of millions in funding.
Quarantining complexity is like a superpower. Here are the design methods and development strategies that companies like Slack, and our team at Drawbackwards, use to pull it off.
UX Design Methods for Quarantining Complexity
What Is Journey Mapping and Why Does It Matter?
Journey mapping is the process of visualizing each step of the customer journey to understand how people interact with and feel about your product over time and across channels.
Beyond the insights it surfaces, journey mapping builds consensus. It gets stakeholders involved, uncovers things that never come up in everyday conversations, and gets people more invested in the project's success. Together, you walk away with a clearer picture of how customers experience your product today, and where it needs to go.
[Learn more about journey mapping in this post.]
What Is the Experience Success Ladder?
The Experience Success Ladder is a benchmark for assessing the value your product or service delivers now, and the goals you can aspire to in the future. Each rung represents a higher state of emotional satisfaction and meaningful value. Moving up the ladder means you are not just better meeting your users' needs, but also increasing your company's likelihood of success.
[Learn more about the Experience Success Ladder in this post.]
Why Use Both Quantitative and Qualitative User Research?
In the past, you could lean on either quantitative or qualitative data to develop smart products. Today, UX design and software product thinking are not so black and white. The best products do not rely on data OR feelings. They use both.
Some of the methods we have found most effective for gathering information to quarantine complexity:
Analytics software Tools like website trackers, heat maps, and other analytics software collect data behind the scenes to show user behavior while people are actually using a product. They are an easy way to gather data from a lot of people without requiring extensive time and resources. Crucially, they track what users are actually doing, not what they say they would do.
Field studies During a field study, your team goes out "into the field" to immerse themselves in a typical day in the life of your user. It is the best way to observe how they actually use products in their natural environment, what external forces affect their decisions and actions, and what their real behaviors look like. UX veteran Jared Spool describes field studies as "the fastest path to great UX" and notes you can reap the benefits in as little as two hours every six weeks. We wholeheartedly agree.
Usability testing Usability testing is about testing your product with real users to see if it works as intended. It is most commonly done after a product is built, but the best results come from testing before, during, and after development. [This article has tons of practical tips on conducting usability testing.]
User interviews User interviews can be done as part of a field study, a usability test, or independently. They involve one-on-one conversations with users to learn more about them, how and why they use a product, what is working well, and what could be improved. Many of the usability testing best practices in the article above also apply to user interviews. [This article has some handy tips too.]
What Are UX Rings?
There are plenty of techniques for tracking qualitative information (user interviews, personas, journey mapping) and plenty of tools for tracking quantitative information (analytics, conversion rate, usage duration). But there is not one that does both.
That is why we created UX Rings.
UX Rings takes the Experience Success Ladder a step further. It provides a multidimensional ranking that combines quantitative and qualitative data to assess your product's or service's performance within each segment. As your product improves to a certain level in each segment, you complete a ring. The goal is to finish all 5 rings, the epitome of successful design, with mastery of each segment of the user experience.
Development Strategies for Quarantining Complexity
How Do You Set Defaults Without Limiting Users?
Using the methods above, the most common user types, paths, and preferences will emerge. Develop your product in a way that makes sense for those common cases, then give users easy configuration options so they can customize if they have different preferences.
A quick tip: It is tempting to surface every option and feature users have access to. Resist that urge. It overwhelms people and makes the interface unusable. Prioritize only the most important configuration options based on your user and business goals, and design and develop them in a way that does not bloat the system or get in the way of the experience.
How Do You Reveal Functionality Without Overwhelming New Users?
A common mistake is showing users everything a tool can do on day one. It is overwhelming and causes frustration and abandonment.
Instead, design and develop the product so it primarily promotes the functionality that your most common users need to complete their most important tasks. Then, nudge them into a more personalized, advanced experience as they become more familiar with it.
For example, offer a tour for new users and set basic notifications based on your user research and UX best practices. Over time, introduce new features, more advanced capabilities, and configuration options for power users.
How Can Auto-Fill Reduce Friction in Forms?
Forms are a weak spot of digital products and services. They often ask users for a lot of unnecessary information, causing frustration and confusion.
To improve the experience, use data gathered from your analytics tools and research, machine learning, artificial intelligence, collaborative filtering, and other methods to auto-fill certain fields.
A basic example: when you ask users for their address during a purchase, instead of requiring them to enter everything manually, you could use autocomplete to suggest the full address as the user is typing, or pre-fill the city and state when they enter their zip code. Or, if a form field has lots of options in a dropdown, surface the most common selections to the top so users do not have to scroll to find what they need.
Quarantine Complexity to Deliver Simplicity
Many people say they want to create software that eliminates the complexity of a task. While it is rarely possible to remove it completely, the best designers and developers can quarantine it. By making tasks easier and more enjoyable to complete, you are not only helping your users but also delivering the kind of experience that directly improves business metrics today while making room for innovation in the future.
For more details on this approach and how it could help your company design better experiences, [get in touch with our team].
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it mean to quarantine complexity in software design? It means shifting the burden of complex decisions away from the user and into the design and code. The experience feels simple on the surface because the hard work happens behind the scenes.
What UX research methods help teams quarantine complexity? The most effective combination is analytics software (to see what users actually do), field studies (to observe behavior in context), usability testing (to validate the product works as intended), and user interviews (to understand motivations and pain points).
Why is showing users all available features a bad idea? Surfacing every feature at once is overwhelming. It increases cognitive load, causes frustration, and often leads users to abandon the product. A better approach is to surface core functionality first, then progressively introduce more advanced features as users grow into the product.
How did Slack use complexity quarantining to grow so fast? Slack designed a sophisticated notification system that makes smart decisions for users automatically, so users always get the right notification in the right place at the right time without having to configure anything complicated. That level of thoughtful design contributed to Slack becoming the fastest startup ever to reach a $1 billion valuation.
What are UX Rings? UX Rings is a framework created by Drawbackwards that builds on the Experience Success Ladder. It combines quantitative and qualitative data into a multidimensional ranking to assess how well a product performs across each segment of the user experience. Completing all 5 rings represents the highest level of UX mastery.
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