When no UI means good UX — 5 tips to implement a no User Interface product
By: Max Masure
Tags: Design, UI, UX

While I was enjoying a well appreciated family break in Charleston, I bumped into a weird object that made me think.

Here is the suspect:

Charleston parking spot meter

Ok so what’s the particularity here? Well, aside from the fact that they use an old device and updated it by removing the handle at the bottom (very confusing as you read all the messages and when it says “Insert coin — Turn handle to right as far as possible after each coin” you can’t find the said handle…), they upgraded the old school meter with credit card payment!

Yes, really. It took me a bit of time to actually process all the information and it’s only after I’ve put some coins (without turning the handle, duh!) that I realized I could have paid by credit card.

Ok so here the User Experience is definitely improvable but I want to talk about something else.

The beauty of this object is the fact that you don’t need an app, you don’t need a flow to guide you step by step (see the horrible UX of the Washington, DC ticket train machine I was talking about on my article “When you’ll design for the Apple Watch, think “when” and not “what””), you don’t have multiple buttons — you actually have zero button. This is a perfect example of no interface.

That’s what got me excited. Here you only see one tear and the credit card icon with an arrow. No doubt on what to do. You just swipe you card and you paid your parking spot. Boom!

This let me thinking about invisible products and services that we will design in the near future and I wanted to share a few starting point to implement a no User Interface product:

1. Pick a platform that already exists.

Digit and Magic are good examples of how you can design a service without designing an actual app. They use the already implemented and well used text-message platform to interact with their customers. Are they still designing a product? Yes they do as the users feel something and get value of using their service. They actually design a User Experience, in the original sense of it. As another example, Square Cash embraced the emails as their first use to send money to someone.

2. Build on top of an existing community

I see this being the next generation of product design. Handy is doing this right now by partnering with Airbnb for example: you can book a Handy cleaning service for your Airbnb listing, directly from Airbnb. You never interact with Handy but, still, you benefit from their service. Some news websites are also going on this direction as they might soon directly host articles on Facebook. The down of this, of course, is that you are depending of the community. So, always have a plan B!

3. Understand the users pain and need

This is the crucial part. The hard part is not building a solution: you need to, first, understand the pain point you want to solve. That’s where User Experience skills are essential in a product with no interface. You need the best people on this task. User interviews, user research, prototyping,… At the beginning of your project, 95% of your budget (money + time) should be in UX. Keep the last 5% for coffee. You’ll need it.

4. Fake it until you make it

Try and try again. Get the concentrated version of your product by testing it over and over again with some users. That’s what they did at FlyCleaners, the laundry service: getting the feedback from their users really help them to build the huge success they have now. You can listen to one of their founders, David Salama, on the podcast interview I had with him last week. Get feedback by watching people using your service. Hire some UX designers that are good at this but, also, do it yourself. Even if you are the CEO. Make everyone on your team conduct some usabilty testing. Getting the feeling of who is going to use your product is crucial. Specifically when your product will live only on your users’ experience, feeling and emotion.

5. Think out of the box

The Apple Watch interaction is so different from what we experienced in the past. The haptic vibration is almost an organic interaction and it even brings a comfort versus the noise notifications we are used to. Wired published an interesting article about the haptic touch of the new Macbook. When you don’t see the UI, you can still feel the UX.

This article was included on the issue #7 of my curated publication “Design for startups: “Tips and tricks about No User Interface products”“.

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“Design for startups” is my curated publication that helps you design when you are not a designer. Tips, tools and interesting articles for startups.

Originally published at www.sophiemasure.com.