It’s been drilled into my head from day one: make your designs predictable. But I don’t think it’s that simple anymore. I think there’s a place for surprises that delight a user and enhance the user experience – but only with constant reinvention can this strategy actually work.

Don Norman’s heuristics maintain this “no surprises” stance most clearly, but so does almost every design text or article I’ve ever read. How do we keep a user happy and unstressed? Make sure they know where they are, what’s going to happen when they click that button, and make it consistent. In a mindset such as this, there’s seemingly  no room for surprises. If you surprise the user, you didn’t do a good enough job of showing them what was going to happen.

Don’t sneak up on your users, they’re delicate flowers… Right?

Sure, users don’t want those jarring and traumatic surprises, but I’d surmise that they probably also don’t want a boring and predicable relationship either. Who wants to spend that much time with something that never changes?

What we really need is to delight our users, which sometimes requires a few (carefully designed) happy surprises.

Delighting our users is a moving target –  graphic design styles need to be constantly updated and reinvented to be relevant (unless you’re brilliant enough to create something that is actually timeless in it’s beauty – good luck), and so do surprises. Sneak up on someone everyday at 3:30, and they’ll start bringing a bat to work.

In all seriousness, check out these two articles that have brought this to mind even more:

Joshua Allen wrote an article for UXMag called “Transience“, speaking to the importance of making ephemeral experiences in your applications. He argues that we can use these transient surprises to really impact our users – but only if we change them the moment they become predictable. Those hilarious achievements you encounter when you do something unexpected in a video game? Transient experiences. Or the PacMan Google logo that everyone went abuzz for? Also a transient experience. Once they become predictable, their value disappears.

Surprisingly on the same day, John McArdle at Normative Design wrote about how levity in error messages is just getting OLD. In his opinion, no one wants to see those cute and funny error messages – they want to know what’s actually going on. But what I really got out of his essay was that “funny” and “cute” error messages are no longer surprising. They don’t delight us anymore because they aren’t unexpected or interesting. The first Fail Whale was a transient experience, but not any more.

How do we capitalize on these ideas? Be transient, design ephemeral surprises into our user experiences by surprising and delighting our users as they go about using the application. But only if we’re willing to take the time to actually make them ephemeral. I’d say an old surprise is a lame surprise, and that’s not even slightly delighting.

Did you read and enjoy The Design of Everyday Things as much as I did? Is your copy worn and tattered? The original apparently came with a series of videos, some of which have surfaced online. I have posted them here for your enjoyment.

Even though they’re from 1994, they’re still highly relevant. An interesting watch!

Affordances

The Action Cycle

Conceptual Models

Conceptual Models of File Systems

Communicating Action Possibilities