Adopting a No-Left-Turn Approach to UX Design

Leveraging the Right Data for Elegant Experiences

Having access to the right data and turning that data into insightful action is not enough—although many think it is. Many others feel lucky to have even that much data. However, being able to turn data into an amazing experience is critical if you want people to take the actions that you desire them to take.

Let’s look at a site like Amazon for a minute. If you choose a high-end blender and add it to your shopping cart, other related items instantly appear on the site—a set of cocktail glasses; a book about making tasty, nutritious smoothies in a blender; a special cleaning tool for blenders that gets to those hard-to-reach parts, and so on. This is data being put to work not only for the company, but if designed right, for the user as well. Ensuring that the site displays the right related things is the first step, especially if you can tie that data to previous purchasing trends. Enabling people to add products to their cart with a one-click process turns your insightful data into a pleasant experience.

Business users continually demand access to all sorts of data. Some data is necessary to execute tasks, most is just nice to have. So it’s not about presenting all the data all the time in a user interface, it’s about recognizing the intent of the user within a given context, and presenting the right data at the right time. This is key to the success of the best companies out there, and it is what enables a user interface to look so clean, simple, and elegant.

Excessive data is the enemy of elegant design. Conveying complex ideas and processes in a simple way is not at all simple to do and requires the freedom for the designer to decide when and how to display what data. Organizational issues often come into play here. Very few organizations have the flexibility to integrate with backend systems, present data, and provide rich interactions in a design. Indeed, most enterprise software applications lack this flexibility and often end up revealing the inadequacies of a back-end data model. If this is the case, you’ll never achieve the design or experience outcomes you seek.

In Conclusion

The concept of no left turns as it applies to UX design is multifaceted. You have to take the time to learn about needs—and not just users’ needs. Learn about the needs of the organization and what its goals are. For UPS, the base-level goal that translated into a no-left-turn mantra was to save money, while at the same time making more of it. They also had the environmentally friendly goal of using less fuel. So being able to come up with the concept of eliminating all left turns from a route had wide-ranging effects that addressed several business goals—if not fully, at least partially.

At this point, I don’t know for sure whether we can come up with a similar approach to solve the issues that came up during that customer workshop. We are still in the research stage, which, in and of itself, is an incredible first step for most enterprises. However, if we are going to be able to successfully develop experiences that eliminate roadblocks for users while addressing underlying business goals, I can’t think of a better first step to take than ensuring we’re not making them take any more left turns. 

Reference

Shontell, Alyson. “Why UPS Is So Efficient: ‘Our Trucks Never Turn Left.’” Business Insider, March 24, 2011. Retrieved April 8, 2018.