Don’t make your users repeat themselves

There are basic principles and pillars that make an app usable. The very most basic is “Follow standard practices whenever possible.” Directly following that, I think, is:

Don’t ever make your users enter the same piece of information twice.

Image from cheezburger.com

We live in the digital age of computers. One of the primary functions of computers is REMEMBERING things. If a user has ever entered something, you should remember it and carry it with them, across pages, across functions, even across applications if need be. If you want to be successful, you should be customer focused. If you are customer focused, the value proposition of saving information for a user and prepopulating forms or shortening workflows for them is fairly evident.

We have all had the experience of having to fill paper forms out in triplicate for government organizations. We’ve also had the experience from the meme above and been impatient.  Why would you put that on your users, when a few lines of code can avoid it?

I once worked for a fortune 500 company where 12 different applications (And a team of 5 people working in tandem) were required to order a single product. The tools were all built by different teams in the company, with different backends and different data output. They didn’t share data between themselves, so at each step, the user would be required to export data and then (in the best case) import it to the next tool.  Sometimes the user had to enter the data manually, and they would literally print it out and set it next to their monitor so they could type it in exactly the same.  I am not kidding you.

Probably, you’re not doing anything quite that bad.  If you are, hang your head in shame, and then fix it.

But you might be asking them for their name in one place, and then for first name and last name somewhere else.  Parse that bad boy out.  Maybe your phone system uses the phone number to look up the customer to see what tier of support they qualify for.  Then make sure your CRM is tied into the phone system so that when the customer is routed to the appropriate representative, that rep has the customer’s info and doesn’t have to ask for it again.

Google’s autocomplete is a prime example of this principle in action.  When you’re typing a search into the form, Google will autocomplete first with things you’ve searched for before, then with the most likely guess.  This is also one reason that Facebook sign ins are so popular – you use Facebook to sign up for a site and your info is there without you having to enter it in the new site. It’s like magic!

In the end, remembering things is probably one of the easiest tasks you can ask your software to do.  As users become more comfortable with computer interfaces, they will begin to expect this basic courtesy, as surely as we expect someone to respond “hello” when we greet them.


Today’s Interesting Link:

SVGeneration – This site is so much fun your head might explode. It’s got a ton of wonderful, tiled backgrounds that you can customize and then generate as SVG files. Go ahead, try not to get addicted. You’re welcome.

 Today’s Usability Quote:

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.  – Thomas Sowell

Today’s Music To Design To:

Silent Shout, by the Knife. With a mysterious, slightly dark groove, this is synthesizer-based music that manages to be futuristic and uplifting and tickles your creative bones in all the right places.  The vocals even have that sort of airy but ominous feeling that lives somewhere between german synth pop and Lords of Acid.  Seriously, it’s worth a listen.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>