What Is The Ease Heuristic? (And How To Leverage It To Improve UX)
Learn everything you need to know about the ease heuristic and how to leverage it to create a better user experience.
“Easy to use” seems like a no-brainer minimum experience standard for any website or app. However, as the digital leader working day in and day out on the property, your threshold for unclear elements, confusing navigation, and minor bugs is much higher than that of the average customer.
What you consider “easy to use” could be completely unintuitive for your audience. That’s why user research and identifying common behavior patterns is so important. Ease of use is about more than just clean layouts and fast load times; it’s about understanding human behavior and anticipating needs before users even realize them.
You can do exactly that by leveraging the ease heuristic. Ease is one of the six Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization™, a tool developed at The Good to theme common optimization issues and opportunities with the user at the center of analyses.
In this article, we’re sharing everything you need to know about the ease heuristic and how to leverage it to create a better website or app. Keep reading to learn:
- How the ease heuristic manifests
- How to identify when your website violates the ease heuristic
- Five ways to improve ease (with examples)
What is ease in UX?
The ease heuristic focuses on making a website, app, or digital product “easy to use.” It ensures users won’t abandon a digital property due to its complexity and offers better accessibility to diverse audiences. It includes aspects like information architecture, navigability, and seamless functionality.
Let’s check out these three pillars of ease in more detail.
What is information architecture?
Information architecture (IA) is the practice of structuring content on digital products (websites, apps) to make it easy for users to find and understand the information they need. It focuses on things like:
- Content grouping that is intuitive
- Navigation design to help users find what they need
- Labeling systems that are clear and consistent
- Search systems that find things efficiently
Effective information architecture enhances the overall user experience by reducing cognitive load, preventing user frustration, and ensuring that users can complete their tasks with ease.
What is navigability?
Navigability refers to the ease with which users can move through a website or application to find what they need (information, features, etc.). Key aspects include:
- Intuitive structure that follows a logical pattern
- Clear labels indicating current location and options for next steps
- Consistent design of uniform patterns to avoid re-learning
- Responsive elements with immediate feedback
- Accessible paths that accommodate all users
Good navigability of elements such as menus, links, buttons, and search bars increases satisfaction by minimizing the effort required to find information and complete tasks.
What is seamless functionality?
Seamless functionality refers to the uninterrupted operation of a digital product, where all features work together for a smooth user experience. Key characteristics include:
- Smooth interactions (clicking, scrolling, swiping) with minimal load time/delays
- Consistent website performance
- Error handling with feedback and recovery options
- Integrated features that update as needed
- User-friendly interfaces that don’t require extensive instructions or support.
- Optimized load times
Achieving seamless functionality ensures that users can accomplish their goals efficiently and without distraction.
How does violating the ease heuristic impact the user?
As mentioned, heuristics are tools used to identify optimization issues or opportunities. Information architecture, navigability, and seamless functionality work together to improve the “ease” of use on a website or app. But how does it impact a user when the ease heuristic is violated?
High Interaction Cost
Violating the ease heuristic can often come at a high interaction cost. For example, a task or interaction requires significant time/effort, creating frustration and resulting in abandonment.
Heavy Cognitive Load
Another way lack of ease impacts a user is by putting undue mental effort into accomplishing a task. This may cause analysis paralysis or frustration, leading to abandonment.
Content Fatigue
Excessive textual/visual content on the page can overwhelm users, hindering their ability to find relevant content for successful task completion.
Unclear System Status
If the interface doesn’t provide enough cues, semantics, or timely feedback to keep users informed, the system status is unclear. This results in stress, uncertainty, and likely abandonment.
Identifying opportunities with user research
If you want to understand where and when your website violates the ease heuristic, the best way is with user research.
While patterns related to violation of the ease heuristic can appear in plenty of user research methods, such as heatmaps, user testing, etc., here are a few examples of how they might specifically show up in session recordings or observational analysis.
- Halted scrolling: The user pauses on the site to possibly engage with content/reorient themselves, which could imply that the user perceives a false bottom. This indicates a heavy cognitive load.
- Hunting and Pecking: The user bounces around the site from page to page, sometimes back-navigating, looking for specific content without finding products of interest. This may indicate unclear system status.
- Scanning: Users scroll over content (text or images) at a higher scroll rate on mobile, while on desktop, they might hover over some words or phrases or completely skip over content altogether. This could indicate a high interaction cost.
Look for this behavior to identify violations of the ease heuristic. Then, you can prioritize opportunities to improve it for a better digital experience.
Behind The Click
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Five ways to make it easy for users (with examples)
Once you know your website violates the ease heuristic and you have identified areas of opportunity, you can hypothesize and test improvements. Here are some ideas for increasing ease on your website.
1. Group products by attributes
When products are not intuitively grouped, users can experience decision paralysis or confusion. Grouping products by shared attributes can reduce frustration and support user wayfinding.
It is especially beneficial when a brand has a large selection of products, like mattress brand Casper.
2. Collapse or expand relevant dropdowns
Content hidden in accordions can cause users to miss critical information in a purchase decision, leading to frustration and abandonment.
Prioritizing relevant drop-downs by expanding them on PDP or category pages can help users better differentiate products and increase the likelihood of purchasing.
Note that it is sometimes necessary to bring in a copy expert to rewrite product copy entirely, focusing on decreasing cognitive load and increasing the user’s value.
3. Refine product grid layout
Users can become overwhelmed with product listings on category pages, especially if there are many SKUs or a large amount of content.
Refining category page layouts to be more scannable may improve shopper experience, easing product discovery and encouraging visits to PDPs.
Specifically, we’ve found success testing on mobile with a 2-up layout so users see more products when they land on a category page. We iterate on category page layouts based on test outcomes and look for opportunities to test things like CTA colors, language, and selector options within product grids.
4. Improve add-to-cart feedback
A lack of notification that a product has been successfully added to the cart can cause users to be unsure of the status, leading to frustration and cart abandonment.
Improving add-to-cart feedback guides users to checkout, increases purchase intention, and reduces uncertainty.
5. Increase the visibility of tooltips
Many tooltips can be hard to see or hidden on a page, which can lead to a lack of understanding and confidence.
Emphasizing tooltips can ease directional guidance and help users understand how a product functions or explain an element on the page in an unobtrusive way, which can lead to better understanding and increase confidence.
Common tooltip use cases include interactive walkthroughs, secondary onboarding, instructions, upsells, feature adoption, and new product updates.
Improving ease (and beyond) in digital experience optimization
Ease is only one of the six Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization™. These heuristics can guide your strategy and help you build digital journeys that feel familiar, do what they say, and function intuitively.
The six heuristics are:
- Priming & Expectation Setting
- Trust & Authority
- Ease
- Benefits & Unique Selling Points
- Directional Guidance
- Incentives
To learn more, or if you’d like our team to review your website for opportunities to improve based on these themes, get in touch.
About the Author
Sumita Paulson
Sumita is a Strategist at The Good with a decade of experience as a front-end developer. She works to create meaningful digital experiences and solve the everyday problems that make up our interactions with technology.