Too many options
People stall, pick nothing, or pick the first thing they see rather than the right thing.
4 symptoms · 3 usual causes
Start from the symptom13 problems, each cutting across several shelves
What is going wrong?
You do not need the vocabulary to find the answer. Pick the symptom you recognise and the Atlas routes you to the reasoning, the patterns, the components and the review passes that address it.
Complex forms
The form is long, the errors arrive late, and a measurable share of people give up partway through.
4 symptoms · 3 usual causes
Information overload
Everything is on screen, nothing is emphasised, and people cannot tell what the page is for.
4 symptoms · 3 usual causes
Poor navigation
People cannot predict where something lives, and search has become the only way through the product.
4 symptoms · 3 usual causes
Nobody finds the feature
The capability exists, works well, and almost nobody knows it is there.
4 symptoms · 3 usual causes
Weak visual hierarchy
The screen is tidy and unreadable: nothing leads, everything competes, and scanning fails.
4 symptoms · 3 usual causes
Unclear errors
Something failed, the message does not say what or why, and there is no route back to working.
4 symptoms · 3 usual causes
Dense dashboards
Twenty charts, no argument. The dashboard reports numbers without telling anyone what to do.
4 symptoms · 3 usual causes
Onboarding takes too long
People sign up, meet a wall of setup before anything useful happens, and never come back.
4 symptoms · 3 usual causes
The product is not accessible
An audit came back long, or somebody reported that the product cannot be used with a keyboard or a screen reader.
4 symptoms · 3 usual causes
Confusing settings
Settings have grown by accretion. Nobody can predict which page a given option lives on.
4 symptoms · 3 usual causes
Data-heavy interfaces
Thousands of rows, dozens of columns, and an interface that makes people export to a spreadsheet instead.
4 symptoms · 3 usual causes
The interface feels slow
Every action pauses. Whether the numbers are bad or not, the product feels heavy to use.
4 symptoms · 3 usual causes
Another way in
Problems start from what is broken. If you know what you are building instead, start from the surface and get the same material organised around the decisions it turns on.