The case for boring interfaces

A few months ago I spent an afternoon moving money between accounts, filing an expense, and renewing a domain. That evening I could not have told you what a single one of those interfaces looked like. All three had worked perfectly.

I have thought about that a lot since. We do not have a good word for it. Boring is the closest one, and it is doing the design a disservice.

Memorable is not the goal

Interfaces get judged in portfolios, which is to say they get judged in screenshots, which is to say they get judged on how they look to somebody who is not trying to do anything. That is a completely different test from the one they face in production, and optimising for the first reliably damages the second.

The scroll-driven hero looks superb in a case study. It costs a returning user four hundred milliseconds every single visit, forever.

Where the personality goes

None of this is an argument for grey rectangles. It is an argument about placement. Character belongs in the places a person meets once or notices only if they look:

• The empty state, before there is anything to be efficient about
• The copy — an error that names the actual problem is a personality
• The details of a control: the weight of a hover, the shape of a focus ring
• The one moment per product that is genuinely worth a flourish

What it does not belong in is the path a person walks forty times a day.

The test

Here is the one I use now. Imagine the person using this on their eightieth day, tired, on a train, trying to finish before their stop.

Everything that helps them stays. Everything that was there for the screenshot goes. It is a boring test and it has never once been wrong.