Is it time for Slow UX?

I’ve just attended this year’s Growing in Content conference, which was excellent. I learned a lot. Most of it was stuff I can take with me back to work, some of it was thought-provoking, and a lot of it made me feel less crazy. But one fairly small thing grabbed a hold of me and won’t let go.

Natalie Shaw gave a talk about her work designing for a dating app called Feeld. This app aims to be more inclusive and sex-positive than other dating apps, which tend to reinforce norms of heterosexuality and monogamy (this is my characterization, not Shaw’s). In particular, Shaw talked about building a feature called “Reflections: A Self-Discovery Tool,” a questionnaire aimed at helping customers understand their own desires and fears when it comes to dating and intimacy. (Reflections is free and pretty interesting — I took it and learned that, yep, I’ve been married for 17 years.)

In her talk, Shaw said that the questionnaire was built in an intentionally unhurried way, giving users time to reflect and sit with the thoughts it was prompting. She talked about trusting people. And she coined a term to describe the approach: “Slow UX.”

This caught a lot of the attendees up short. In our own work, all we hear anymore is speed. Build faster. Ship faster. Iterate faster. Fail faster. And our customer’s experiences are reflecting that. Get them where they want to go faster. Get them through the funnel faster. Have they not moved their mouse in 30 seconds? Better ask them if they’re still there!

As UX professionals, one of our guiding principles is not to waste people’s time. But it’s worth asking at this point if all the work done to reduce friction has not left our customers feeling like they’re hurtling down a bobsled course. Are they being hustled along when they could really use a break? Are we helping them or are we exhausting them? I know I feel drained by every website and app demanding constant interaction.

What would a slow UX look like? It could take a lot of forms. Greater emphasis on “one thing per page,” which is an established principle but one that a lot of businesses find inconvenient. Less reliance on familiar metrics that measure customer behavior but not outcomes. A willingness to trade short-term gains for long-term value. Confidence in the service we’re providing.

Yeah, it’s a pipe dream, perhaps. It doesn’t track with more everything forever. But for smaller companies, maybe it would be a differentiator. As an example, I’m a founding subscriber to Defector, and my favorite thing about it is that I can read a blog and then leave. They don’t constantly ping me to come back and read more blogs. Defector won’t become a billion-dollar company any time soon, but they’re serving me in exactly the way I want to be served. That’s something we could all use a little more of.