In Defence of Boring Interfaces

Boring is a strange insult to level at a tool. Nobody wants a surprising bank, an inventive lift, or an expressive smoke alarm. Yet somewhere in the review, someone will ask whether the interface could be more exciting, and the honest answer is usually that it should be less.

Novelty is a tax the user pays

Every unfamiliar pattern asks the visitor to learn something before they can do anything. A custom select, a reinvented date picker, a scroll that hijacks the wheel. Each one is a small toll, collected from every person, every time, so that the interface can be distinctive for the three seconds anyone spends admiring it.

Conventions are not a failure of imagination. They are accumulated agreement about what things mean, and using them well is how a product stops explaining itself and starts being useful.

Nobody has ever recommended a product because its dropdown was surprising.

What boring actually looks like

Boring is not the absence of care. It is care spent on things that do not announce themselves:

• Buttons that look like buttons and stay where they were
• States for loading, empty and error that were designed rather than discovered in production
• Copy that says what will happen when you press the thing
• Focus rings that are visible, because some people navigate with a keyboard
• Layouts that do not move once they have loaded

Every one of those is invisible when it works. That is the point. The measure of an interface is not how much of it the visitor noticed, it is how little they had to.

Save the personality for where it belongs

None of this means a product must be characterless. Voice, illustration, motion and colour can carry enormous personality, and they do it best in the places where nobody is trying to complete a task: the marketing pages, the empty states, the moment after something succeeded.

The rule of thumb is straightforward. Be interesting where the visitor is looking around. Be predictable where the visitor is trying to get something done.

The compliment you are aiming for

The best review a working interface gets is a shrug. Someone came to do a thing, they did it, and they left without composing a sentence about the experience in their head.

That shrug takes an enormous amount of work, and it will never be the screenshot anybody shares. Build for it anyway.