Why The Best UX Design Is Invisible & How To Measure It

Don’t strive to make your design stand out. Instead, focus on mak­ing it invis­i­ble.

Larry Marine By Larry Marine from Intuitive Design. Join the discussion » 0 comments

If your users have to pay atten­tion to your inter­face, there’s some­thing wrong with it. Your inter­face should be invis­i­ble, not obvi­ous.


Con­sid­er the ubiq­ui­tous office-build­ing door. As you are leav­ing the office build­ing, you approach the door and instinc­tive­ly grab the han­dle, pulling it to open the door. But to your shock and dis­may, the door doesn’t open.

Then you see it, the lit­tle sign above the han­dle that says PUSH. You feel like an idiot because you can’t open some­thing as sim­ple as a door.

The design of that door inter­rupts the users’ task and cre­ates a neg­a­tive expe­ri­ence. If some­thing as sim­ple as a door requires instruc­tions, there’s some­thing inher­ent­ly wrong with the design.

A door should not require users to pay atten­tion to it in order to use it. Instead of a han­dle, a bet­ter design uses a flat pan­el on the door, which invites only one action, the cor­rect one, to push.

With a pan­el instead of a han­dle, you push the door open and walk out with­out giv­ing the door a sec­ond thought. The flat pan­el makes the door “invis­i­ble.”

You Can’t Design ‘Delight’

I’ve heard so many peo­ple say they want their design to delight the user. While it sounds good, you can’t actu­al­ly design “delight.”

A door with a pan­el will not delight you, but it won’t inter­rupt you or cre­ate a neg­a­tive expe­ri­ence, either. It is, essen­tial­ly… invis­i­ble.

Though you can’t design “delight,” you can design inter­faces that avoid neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences and help the users com­plete their task with a min­i­mum of effort, thus cre­at­ing a sense of “delight.”

Ex: Selecting Shipping Methods

Con­sid­er the ubiq­ui­tous ship­ping method selec­tion in a typ­i­cal ecom­merce site. You’ve seen a thou­sand of them, but I’ve only found one that does it cor­rect­ly.

How many times have you had to stop and think about which method to use and won­dered exact­ly what day your pack­age would arrive. Must of that con­fu­sion lies in the ter­mi­nol­o­gy they use to describe the choic­es, such as 3–4 busi­ness days. You prob­a­bly won­dered if that includ­ed Sat­ur­day, since the deliv­ery com­pa­nies oper­ate on Sat­ur­days.

Proflowers Shipping Calendar

ProFlow­ers elim­i­nates the con­fu­sion by offer­ing a cal­en­dar and ask­ing users to select the day they would like the flow­ers to arrive. This lim­its the ship­ping choic­es to only those that achieve the desired deliv­ery date. This sim­ple change removes any doubt or con­fu­sion and makes the user feel con­fi­dent that the flow­ers will arrive on time.

I’ve seen oth­er meth­ods that attempt to reduce user con­fu­sion, such as esti­mat­ed deliv­ery dates, and deliv­ery rules for each selec­tion, but each of these are lit­tle more than instruc­tions on a door and none are as “invis­i­ble” as the ProFlow­ers approach.

How Do You Measure Invisible?

So how can you “see” some­thing that’s invis­i­ble? Like track­ing an invis­i­ble man in the snow, fol­low the foot­prints, your site ana­lyt­ics.

Review the page paths that typ­i­cal users fol­low. The more times a user revis­its a page, the less invis­i­ble or delight­ful your design is to them. If your site ana­lyt­ics show that users flowed direct­ly through the site with­out hav­ing to revis­it the same pages, then your design is more invis­i­ble.

You can also sur­vey users to under­stand their per­cep­tions about com­plet­ing their task on your site. Com­pare their per­cep­tions with actu­al results to mea­sure the effec­tive­ness of your design. The 2 things you can use to gauge the invis­i­bil­i­ty are:

  • Per­cep­tion of time: How long did users think it took to com­plete their task. The less time it feels like it took vers­es actu­al time, the bet­ter your design.
  • Num­ber of pages: How many pages do users recall using to com­plete the task. The few­er pages they recall than they actu­al­ly vis­it­ed.

If users com­plain about the num­ber of pages or the time it took, then you’ve failed. But don’t think that few­er clicks or pages are the answer, either. The point is to design a UI where the pages become invis­i­ble. As oth­er blog posts dis­cuss, few­er clicks or pages are NOT the right answer. It’s real­ly more about the right num­ber of pages for the task.

It Takes a Practiced Eye

An unfor­tu­nate side effect of the invis­i­bil­i­ty of good UX is that, if done well, no one notices it. If they don’t notice it, they don’t val­ue it.

I’m often asked for a port­fo­lio of my UX designs by poten­tial clients, many of whom who usu­al­ly focus on the visu­al lan­guage or tech­ni­cal fea­tures. These clients don’t get it and I usu­al­ly turn down those projects.

I used to try and edu­cate these folks, but one thing I’ve learned after 25 years as a UX design­er is nev­er try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.

If, how­ev­er, the client describes how eas­i­ly they under­stand the inter­face or web­site, I know they are focus­ing on the right aspects of good UX design and work­ing with them will be mutu­al­ly suc­cess­ful (and enjoy­able). Our design meet­ings will be about the psy­chol­o­gy of user expe­ri­ence and how to make the inter­face “invis­i­ble,” not about what col­ors will “delight” the user or how many more fea­tures we can add.


On your next redesign, rather than falling prey to the com­mon, yet inef­fec­tive, approach of striv­ing to make your design stand out, focus, instead, on mak­ing it invis­i­ble. That’s not to say that tech­nol­o­gy and visu­al design are unim­por­tant, but that there needs to be a bal­ance between tech­nol­o­gy, visu­al and UI design. That del­i­cate bal­ance is not easy to achieve, but will launch your sin­gle dig­it con­ver­sion rates into the realm of dou­ble-dig­it suc­cess­es.

Larry Marine

Written by Larry Marine

Director, UX Design, Intuitive Design

Larry Marine earned his degree in User Experience/User Centered Design from the father of UX, Dr. Don Norman. A UX Consultant for 25 years, Larry has created some of the most successful designs on the web, including Proflowers, FedEx Print, and others. His success comes from looking at web interactions very differently, from the user's perspective. His talks, though infrequent, are often some of the most well-attended and reviewed at various conferences. His depth and breadth of experience and knowledge puts him in that rare breed often referred to as a true UX expert.

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