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Habit, safety, & growth: UX, design, & libraries
If there’s anything this past year has taught me through user research, it’s this: humans operate on habit.
the lures of habit
Habit literally shapes our days. It crafts our time, it determines where we go, what we see, what we do. Habit is comfortable. It is reassuring. It is safe.
Habit serves many functions for us, from ease to (perceived) effectiveness. When students talk about their academic habits, they often also talk about efficiency. Ask a student why they are doing something a certain way, and you might hear several things:
- “This was how I was shown to do it (that one time)”
- “This saves me time”
- “I know how to do it (this way)”
Try to teach another way of doing something, and you’ll immediately encounter resistance, especially if you can’t prove the case that this is faster/easier/more efficient — or hopefully all three.
We navigate websites by habit — that’s why design conventions work. We look in certain places for the navigation, we expect certain things from our search results, we skim and scan for the same keywords. When things are different, we stumble. Or we miss seeing them entirely.
