The three clicks rule – designers’ hope for audience sanity!

Image Posted on March 18, 2014

The three clicks rule – designers’ hope for audience sanity!

To sit in a corner at your office station watching designers and developers fly their fingers over keyboards in speeds one cannot even hope to achieve in ten blue moons, must sound like a day well spent, engrossed in the hypothetical wonder of the technological world; but! –but the entire aroma of technological brilliance blows up in smoke if one such system becomes a victim of plain dark fury of a frustrated user.

To avoid this anguish imposed on their dearly designed systems, designers came up with a rule that very sternly signifies the importance of only three clicks required from a user to reach their destination in an application or a website. Any further clicks/taps required only end up complicating the program, slowly and gradually pushing the audience towards the inevitable rage.

Since it isn’t an official rule, a lot of programmers and designers are against the concept of three clicks and call it a myth as their applications are running and running well with as much as 25 clicks per destination. But according to me, it is always the point towards a saying/rule/quote that we humans miss. What I mean is that the three clicks rule does not necessarily imply to use EXACTLY THREE CLICKS. It means that the user is easily directed towards his destination. For that, what is needed is to understand the purpose of the application you are developing. For example, if you are developing an application for weather update and the user has to open a dozen windows within windows to merely synchronize his device settings to the local area; well, then you very well deserve a perfectly targeted outburst from users. Such designers can learn from applications such as Weather Magic Pro, where within three clicks, not only you can adjust your location but also add dormant weather screens for other locations.

Upon mention of three clicks rule, a highly talented designer at DynamoLogic stated in the simplest of terms, saying, ‘When designing an application, the designer has to actually put himself in the mind of the user to gauge what they require and how they require it. And since, almost 90% of the community is found to expect easily accessible user apps, there’s the three click rule to follow!’ He further illustrated that from his experience with development of applications he has found this rule to keep systems simple, easy and problem free. I personally call it the sanity switch!