Hollywood Goodbyes and Focused Content

In the movie, Fight Club, there’s a scene where Edward Norton’s character is on the phone with Detective Stern, who is investigating Norton’s condo fire. The dialogue goes like this:

Detective Stern: “You just let me know if you’re going to leave town… Ok?”
Edward Norton: “Ok”
click

For a movie, this way of abruptly ending the conversation without a proper goodbye is the norm. In real life, to end the conversation without an awkward string of reassuring goodbyes would be rude.

So why do movie scripts omit this? Why don’t directors ever ask their actors to keep it real and drag out the goodbyes a little more?

Let’s try it. I’ll re-write the scene above with what I imagine would be real-life dialogue:

Detective Stern: “You just let me know if you’re going to leave town… Ok?”
Edward Norton: “Ok”
Stern: “Ok, have a good day.”
Norton: “Thanks, you too.”
Stern: “Goodbye.”
Norton: “Bye.”
click

As I read through that, something is painfully obvious. The long goodbye is distracting me from the main storyline. In my attempt at realism, I’ve created an obstruction that viewers will have to climb over to get back to the real story.

That’s why 99 out of every 100 goodbyes* get cut out of every film production. It’s unnecessary and distracting.

It brings us to the famous Dieter Rams quote:

“Good design is as little design as possible. Less, but better — because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.”

Rams’ ideas around design surpass any media. In film, we have scriptwriters dropping goodbyes so viewers can enjoy the story without distraction. As product designers, we must drop confusing page content so our users can stay focused on the task at hand.

Fruits n’More

Let’s say we have been hired to redesign the shopping path of Fruits n’More†, an online retailer of fresh produce. After years of “successful” test and learn, the product listings page is a mess. Never mind the fruit salad of visual styles, the content has lost its hierarchy and all the messages are mixed.

Where do we begin? If we were writing a script where the characters were talking over each other and the dialogue was confusing, we would think about the overall story. What we do want to happen? What dialogue carries us through the story? What distracts us from it?

It’s the same for our page. We need to start by saying what we want to happen, which is a way of defining what our page should help users do.

The Job of the Page

Let’s define the job of our page by saying:
“The Page should make it easy for shoppers to browse high-level, summarized information on our produce offerings, easily scan and compare the high-level info across listings, then click through to learn more and/or buy.”

If this sounds obvious, that’s fine. Obvious is good. It means that everyone agrees, and it should be easier moving forward to keep the content focused to help the page perform its job. If we don’t take the time to define it, however, we can’t refer to it later when it gets tempting to let distracting content creep in.

Just like a script has a story outline to keep it focused, we now have a page job to rally our content around. We can focus our efforts on avoiding the burden of the non-essential.

Just one thing, how exactly do we do that? Our listings are a mess.

The Content Audit

Now that we’ve established the page job, we can move on to assessing what content is focused and what is distracting. The best way to determine what stays and what goes is to review every single piece of content in the listing and write it down.

With every piece of content captured, we can then scrutinize and rate. If it helps the page perform its job, we’ll keep it for now. If it’s something that was tested 5 years ago and has since become a staple of the product listing but isn’t in line with the newly defined job, then we should be critical about its inclusion. If it’s good information but too detailed, we can cut it and push it to the details page.

Once we’ve narrowed down our list, it’s time to create a visual designer’s best friend: hierarchy. We’ll go through each item and rate it in terms of importance to the job of the page.

The result is a beautifully groomed list of content pieces organized by importance. Comparable to dialogue that keeps viewers focused on the story, we can use this list to design content-first without fear of distracting our users from the job of the page.

And how it looks with the rest of the page:

This article is a how-to on focusing content around a specific story or job.‡ The listings above are untested, and truthfully, probably wouldn’t perform as well against the original. This is because experiences that use manipulative tactics tend to convert higher than those that don’t. Our mammoth task as product designers is to create experiences that don’t annoy users but convert higher than the ones that do. This starts with focused content but definitely does not end there. For anyone ready to tackle the job of designing for good UX and higher conversion rates, I recommend the level-headed perspective that Cassandra Naji provides in Pop-Ups Vs. Usability, Conversions, And Bounce Rates.

When designing anything, it’s important to stay focused. In movie scripts, this means not distracting viewers from the main story with unnecessary dialogue. In the web world, this means not distracting users from the job of a page. The way we keep everything on track is through documentation. Throughout the process, if something doesn’t seem to fit, we can go back to the documented job and compare. Does this new design feature help the page do what we agreed it should? Or is this a distraction from the job, the story, the goal? Does this message add to the story, or distract from it?

Follow this format and see how much easier it is to identify appropriate content from distractions. Then trim the excess, don’t distract your users from the story. Cut the goodbyes.

*Not real data.
†Not a real company. At the time of this article, “fruitsnmore.com” doesn’t go anywhere. If it does sometime in the future, I apologize for the coincidence.
‡Thanks to Scott K. Jones for teaching me this method.