Design your way

How easy would things turn out to be if you would have the internet take the obvious decisions on your behalf like the way humans do?

Gone are those days when the users had to keep clicking till frustration seeped in. Anticipatory design brings a revolution in UX design by giving users everything in a way they want to – speedily and easily.

With the technology racing forward, businesses will suffer if they don’t reduce consumer work by taking up the obvious decisions on behalf of the consumers. And that’s where Anticipatory design comes to the rescue.

The term anticipatory design was coined in the year of 2015 by Aaron Shapiro, the CEO of Huge. And then, anticipatory design has managed to bring a revolution in the world of UX.

Read on to know what anticipatory design is and how you can implement it in your web design to increase conversions.

What is Anticipatory Design?

Anticipatory design has been around longer than you have known. It works on the logic – If users do X, show them Y. Just like the way Google works – It anticipates a couple of possible options based on the search queries you are using and shows various search options related to the keywords you just typed in.

Imagine yourself booking a cab through the Uber Mobile Application.

Now, if you would have your location turned on, you would notice that the application immediately takes your current location as the starting point of your journey. Now, all that you would have to do is to select the destination. This is a clear example of how the clicks made by a user is reduced because of anticipatory design.

When it comes to hardware, Amazon Dash Button and Google Nest are clear examples of anticipatory design.

Amazon Dash Button lets you hit the button to automatically place an order for the respective product when it gets exhausting. And you don’t even have to worry about accidentally placing an order because you would get a text on your registered number to cancel the order if placed by mistake.

Google Nest Thermostat – A modern-day thermostat that mugs up your schedule and adjusts itself according to the temperature you had set it to, previously, based on the different timings.

You get to control it with your cell phone and other than that, it realizes when you are at home and when you are not, through sensors and your phone’s location and then it adjusts itself to the eco temperature to save energy.

Netflix has used the concept of anticipatory design very well.

When you look up a particular series on Netflix, your choices are being analyzed and your user behavior is being tracked.

So the next time you look up a new series, a list of similar and relevant content is being recommended to you. This reduces your effort to find similar content and this also shows you a list of series that you might have intended to watch later.

Anticipatory aids in simplification of UX by narrowing down the clicks or decisions a user has to make.

Now that you know what anticipatory design is, know what it is commonly mistaken as to be.

The miles between Personalization and Anticipatory Design

Personalization and Anticipatory Design can easily be confused for being the same. While both work towards the same goal of customer satisfaction, anticipatory design and personalization stand a mile apart. Anticipatory design is built on the base of intelligent personalization.

Companies use various tools like Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, CrazyEgg etc. to track user behavior on their website. They use the browsing history of the particular user to show them a list of the products that are similar to what they had browsed through before. They also show a list of recommended items that would be in accordance with the browsing history of individual users.

This is known as personalization where the list of recommendations varies from person to person, leaving the decision in the hands of the user i.e. whether he wants to choose from the list.

Anticipatory Design walks yet another mile to create a better user experience. While personalization shows a user what he wants, anticipatory design takes the decisions on the behalf of the user.

Why Anticipatory Design

Choosing on behalf of the users does seem like a big step forward. But in the world of choice overload, anticipatory design is actually a blessing in disguise.

Anticipatory design is all about relieving the user of decision fatigue, which is closely related to the Paradox of Choice.

A famous study conducted by two psychologists – Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper revealed that consumers were 10x more likely to purchase a jar of jam when they were asked to choose from a variety of 6 over a variety of 24. More customers were attracted to the variety of 24, no doubt. But they found it mentally tiring to choose one from the 24. On the other hand, more people bought jam when they were asked to choose one from 6. This is known as the Paradox of Choice.

The more the options, the tougher it becomes to land on a decision. An average adult makes about 35000 decisions a day and instead of making the wrong decision from too many options, he is going to procrastinate on making the decision. And the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision making is known as decision fatigue.

How to use Anticipatory Design for a better user experience

Anticipatory design can be implemented in web design to boost user experience. But it needs an easy user interface because people won’t get to the decision-making stage if the design is not understood. And that requires a responsive web design.

After you create a responsive web design, you should track user behavior to figure out if the decision-making elements in your web design i.e. CTAs, forms etc. are fueling the fire of decision fatigue.

Now, let’s say you own a Web Development Outsourcing firm and a customer is filling out the Ballpark Cost Estimation form on your website. When he finally ends up on the layout field where he has to make a choice between Fixed and Responsive, he sees that the option for Responsive Design has been already chosen by default. The user now moves forward to the next form field.

This is anticipatory design. You, as a Web Development Outsourcing firm, know that Responsive Web Design is in trend. And since you know that, you anticipated that most of your clients would also be interested in having a responsive layout for their website. So you made Responsive Design as the default option in the Layout form field.

Now, this may seem like too tiny a step to you. But you actually reduced a click for the user by anticipating the needs of the user.

And it is the addition of several of such small steps that sum up to be a clever anticipatory design. But to get in-depth information for each step, you need to gain customer intelligence i.e. do a smart analysis of all the customer data that you have accumulated.

Although, one thing to be taken care of while creating an anticipatory design is that you must not cross the subtle line between the decisions allowed to be taken and the decisions that you must not be taking. Users won’t appreciate if you go ahead and automatically order a product they have been checking out frequently on your website.

But the one thing that must be taken care of while creating an anticipatory design is that you must be sure of the decisions that the customers would be okay with you taking them. They wouldn’t appreciate it if you anticipate what card they would be willing to pay from without asking them.

You can also give users the option to prefill certain fields the way Google Chrome does every time you have to fill up any random form that consists of similar fields like name, email i.d. etc.

To get started, here’s what you should do.

1. Look for ways to make decisions simpler for the user
2. Suggest an action based on previous preferences
3. Pre-fill the general form fields

These tips will make decision-making design elements time saving, which will, in turn, enhance the user experience by reducing the number of clicks they would have to make.

Key Takeaways

Anticipatory design is the future of the web because it promises more output through less input. We are swiftly moving into the world of AI and Machine Learning and anticipatory design is just a part of it. And one of the main reasons why it sounds so promising is because users are subconsciously looking forward to faster and better results through fewer choices.

Thus, anticipatory design is bound to be the turning point in your business if you make the appropriate decisions on behalf of your users.

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