Don't Make Me Think (Reduce Thinking, Not Clicks)
Optimize for the fewest decisions, not the fewest clicks — eight trivial taps beat two fraught ones
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 92%
A counter to the 'minimize clicks/taps' dogma. Every decision costs the user metabolic energy and, worse, risks making them feel stupid. The goal is to minimize the thinking required, even if that means more taps — surface the two or three most common actions, hide the rest behind 'other', and make each step trivially easy.
Origin
Butterfield credits Steve Krug's book 'Don't Make Me Think' as a mantra 'up there with utility curves,' and cites the early Uber app's 'Where would you like to go? / Other' design as the ideal.
Core principles
- 01Making a decision literally burns glucose and causes decision fatigue; an unclear decision also makes users feel stupid and they blame the product
- 02Fewest clicks is almost always the wrong goal — you could make everything one click by dumping every option on one endless screen
- 03Eight trivially-easy taps beat two taps where each is a fraught, multi-option comparison
How to run it
- 1
Identify the two or three things people actually want here
For any screen or menu, determine the handful of highest-frequency actions users come to perform.
Pro tip Early Uber nailed this: 'Where would you like to go?' plus 'Other' for everything else, because almost everyone just wants to pick a destination.
- 2
Promote the common actions, bury the rest behind 'other'
Present the top few actions directly and put everything else behind a single 'other' that opens a submenu.
Pro tip Tuning what goes in the top few versus 'other' is one of the most important design decisions.
- 3
Chunk long menus with dividers
If a menu has ~14 items, group them and add horizontal dividers so people can chunk and scan instead of comparing every option to every other.
Watch out Comparing 15 options is geometrically more expensive than comparing three — the cost of comparison explodes with the number of choices.
- 4
Trade taps for triviality
Prefer more steps where each is obvious over fewer steps where each requires opening menus and figuring out which option is right.
Pro tip Run the sanity check: close your eyes, pretend to be a 'natural human being,' open them, and see if you can tell what to do and what the impact will be.
In the wild
The opening screen offered only a destination field and 'Other' (which contained changing payment, pickup location, everything). Almost all the time people just wanted a destination, so the screen was perfect.
→ Maximum simplicity: one obvious primary action, everything else one tap away.
Butterfield watched a 15-year-old tap Snapchat four-plus times per second with total fluidity — each tap a trivial 'do I want to see this again?' decision. Trying to make her tap less would have destroyed the experience.
→ Proof that low click counts are not the goal; effortless per-tap decisions are.
Common mistakes
Chasing minimum clicks
Reducing clicks by cramming options onto one screen makes each decision harder, not easier — the opposite of the intended benefit.
Ignoring the emotional cost
An unclear decision doesn't just cost energy; it makes users feel dumb, and they associate that bad feeling with the product forever.
Is it for you?
Best for
Designers and PMs structuring navigation, menus, and multi-step flows in any consumer or prosumer app
Not ideal for
Expert power-user tools where users deliberately want every option exposed for speed
From the transcript
“if there is one mantra that I would use to replace that, it's don't make me think”
“what is the two things, what is it, maybe three things that people could want to do here, and then put everything behind other”
“if it takes them eight clicks or taps to do something, but every single one is trivially easy, that's great”
From the episode
Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield