While I've grown to appreciate this fact more and more over
time, it's never become completely clear until a recent
discovery with one of our applications processes. The below
wireframe is a rough representation of what a fragment of our
page for accepting an invitation to a company site looks like.
Once a user selects that they would like to accept the
invitation, we ask them if they are already users of our
application, or if they wish to create a new account. We all
thought the process was simple enough with little room for
misinterpretation or error. After witnessing a few users
interacting with this page, we discovered that there were two
main problems with this approach. The first was that we relied
heavily on the "Do you already have an account" statement to be
read, which turned out not to be the case. The second is that we
didn't expect the "Yes" and "No" buttons to be interpreted the
way they were. What ultimately happened can be seen in the
pseudo heatmap below. Users completely ignored the "Do you