Don’t Build A Maze For Your Users

Diego Schmunis
3 min readAug 14, 2024

Today, the average human attention span is 8.25 seconds — less than the attention span of a goldfish.

If your users have to spend any time figuring out what your product does and how it does it, you’ve already lost.

And that’s the problem with feature-driven development (a.k.a. throwing spaghetti at the wall). It lends itself to creating a bunch of features (most of them never needed or used) that are all over the place, many of them half-cooked and disjointed from any logical workflow, customer journey, or job to be done. It’s just a bunch of UI controls with no primal focus, intent, or purpose.

Throwing spaghetti at the wall results from the absence of a clear vision, mission, and desired stated outcomes, and it is a product development strategy based on luck.

To quote the great Obi-Wan Kenobi: “In my experience, there is no such thing as luck.”

This approach drives the creation of a product and customer experience that feels like being stuck inside a maze. It may seem fun at first, but after a while, without a clear path to progress and the right outcomes (e.g., finding the exit), it starts to lead to confusion, exhaustion, and eventually, customers giving up and never returning.

Instead, a better approach is one driven by purpose and intent, supported by a solid foundation of vision, focus, and strategy-driven outcomes.

Purpose is the specific value and outcome we want our customers to realize using our products.

Intent is the HOW and WHY that explains how a particular feature, workflow, screen, or UI component helps drive the user easily and directly to their purpose.

Every pixel on the screen and interaction must have a clear and specific intent to help the user achieve an outcome. Anything that distracts from this must be removed.

An excellent exercise commonly used by writers and editors is to try to rewrite what they wrote using half the words without losing the meaning and impact.

So, next time you are working on a new area of your product, try this exercise: First, ask: Do I need to add this new feature, functionality, screen, UI object, etc.? How will it contribute to my users’ realizing their purpose? If you can’t clearly explain HOW and WHY it’s needed, then it’s not required and will only introduce friction and confusion to the customer experience.

If you already have a mature product, see how much you can remove without diminishing the value and outcomes your customers get from it. I’ll bet that, most likely, it will only increase them.

Remember…

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Give this post some ❤️ by 👏 and share it ♻️

👉 Diego Schmunis for more insightful content

--

--

Diego Schmunis

🌟 Observations while on a journey of discovery and self-development through exploring creativity and self-expression. Let's explore together. Join me! 🚀