Red Route Usability

Driving around a bustling city has its ups, but it also has its downs—traffic. Nobody likes traffic, especially when your quick 15-minute drive turns into a 45-minute arduous trek during rush hour. It plagues just about every major city. But if you have ever been to London, England, you may have noticed something unique about their roads: double red lines that extend most streets along the curb.

London has more cars on the road than they do parking spaces. If you choose to drive, trying to find a space to park your car often entails circling streets hoping to land on an empty spot that can just about fit. But, in recent years, this has become much harder thanks to the introduction of double red lines on major London roads. 

These indicate a complete ban on vehicles stopping, parking, or unloading. These roads, otherwise known as red routes, keep the roads clear so traffic can move swiftly and efficiently. Indeed, this initiative paid off (with a little intervention required from traffic wardens patrolling the roads).

What does this have to do with usability? Dr. David Travis had the idea of introducing this concept to the UX space. Red routes in UX design are the tasks users frequently perform on a website or application. These are the key paths or actions essential for users to achieve their main goals. By labeling these paths as red routes, designers can achieve two main objectives:

1. Identify the most used/important features of a product
2. Prioritize the relevant digital content and its functionality to help users seamlessly complete these key tasks.

Completing these elements while optimizing red routes ensures a smoother and more efficient user experience. This helps lead to higher user satisfaction and better overall performance of the application or website. 

According to Dr. Travis, red routes have five characteristics:²

1. Involve a complex task: The route to completing a key task should involve a multitude of steps to complete (i.e. it should not be a simple task).

2. Lead to task completion: It is more than being user-friendly. They should indicate a tangible measure of success. The user should be accomplishing something when using a red route.

3. Involve a common task: Red routes for one website should be similar to competing websites but simpler to use. So, they cannot be an activity uniquely found on one website. There should be some ability to carry over the red route to other sites.

4. Be goal-oriented

5. Be realistic: The focus of the red route should align with the customer’s objectives as well as the organization’s.

Red routing, a method of figuring out what the critical paths are, requires designers to create a matrix with two criteria. One is the number of users that perform the task and the other is the frequency with which users perform the task. Take the image below as an example.

Designers categorize the tasks that can be performed when using a digital product by how many of the total users perform the task and how often. This helps to identify the red route of the product (A.K.A tasks that are the most frequently completed by the highest number of users). These verge towards the top right corner of the matrix whereas the lower priority interactions inch toward the bottom left. 

The red routes end up being the highest priority content for the designer since they outline the most important activities being accomplished by the user. So by using the above example of shoppers on an e-commerce website, checking out and making payments should be the content designers focus on the most as opposed to signing up for the newsletter. 

The process of red routing highlights to designers the most important path to focus on. In turn, designers need to ensure that these paths provide a smooth user journey since they greatly contribute to users’ overall perception of a digital product.³ 

Let’s go back to the e-commerce example. If the user’s journey to complete the red route of checking out and making a payment is confusing and complicated, the user will likely be frustrated with the product. However because this task is a critical one for users, the frustration will translate into a bad user experience overall. This is not what designers want to happen. So, designers make use of red routes to solve usability issues when doing a critical task in hopes that users will be happy with the product’s performance.

In a nutshell, a red route is the most important user path of a digital product. It is important because the activity being completed is considered the most frequently done by the greatest number of users. Identifying a red route (via the matrix above) marks to designers the user path they need to ensure performs the smoothest. This ends up contributing to users’ perception of a seamless digital experience.