One Screen, One Thing
Photo by Mike Dorner on Unsplash
Inspired by Ryan Singer
The team was deep in presentation mode — sharing the new dashboard designs with our Product Leader. After 10 minutes of polite squirming, unable to contain himself, he exclaimed, “People don’t use dashboards!” You could hear the frustration in his voice — exhaustion earned through years of failed attempts at making the one perfect screen.
Now, this executive rarely voiced such a strong opinion, so when he did, I took notice. I filed it away and let my subconscious mind chew on it. Fast forward six months and guess what, we’re still working on that dashboard. What was going on? Why are dashboards so elusive?
Well, as luck would have it, Jason Fried and DHH recently did a live stream demo of their product, Basecamp. They walked through how they used Basecamp the product, to run Basecamp, the business. It made for a great demo, but what struck me was how each page had a clear primary action.
“Software gets complicated when one thing does two things.” — Ryan Singer, Designer at Basecamp
Maybe that was the problem with our designs? They lacked a clear ‘what is the user here to do?’ Unclear purpose, unclear design. It’s like that drawer in your kitchen — the one with your keys, coins, scissors, tape, and old gift cards. Why doesn’t the knife rack become the miscellany drawer?
Fuzzy Purpose → Unconstrained Design → Messy Use. If you’re seeing confusion in your product, it’s not a bug, it’s working as designed.
“Every screen we design should support a single action of real value to the person using it. This makes it easier to learn, easier to use, and easier to add to or build on when necessary. Screens that support two or more primary actions become confusing quickly. Like a written article should have a single, strong thesis, every screen we design should support a single, strong action that is its raison d’etre.” — Joshua Porter
The path to poor design is to give a single page lots of jobs — to have it do many things. One screen, one thing.
p.s We’re still working on that dashboard.
Like articles on building product? Subscribe to receive by email.