A while back, I was travelling on a local bus to the city. My co-passenger was visibly going through some distress and was frantically attending to multiple phone calls at the same time. He needed to record his phone conversations but couldn't quite figure out how. So, he turned to me and asked for help.
When I showed him how he could record his calls using TrueCaller, I was amazed by his memorisation of my instructions. He didn't necessarily bother to read the text that UI/UX designers so meticulously craft. All that clever, apt copy – down the drain. Neither was he paying any attention to some of the other features added for usability such as colours to segregate different sections, typography and other elements.
All he remembered and brute-forced into his brain was the pattern.
Now, the interesting part is that TrueCaller isn't a badly designed app by any means. However, when the user avoids all the prompts that the team has so meticulously added, how does one force behaviour? Or even get people to click on the correct button?
Interestingly, we rarely design applications with pattern recognition and recall being considered a major factor in terms of usability and experience. This particular person would struggle if the application suddenly opened on Screen '3'. He would keep searching for the button he needed to press on Screen '2'. This was very interesting to observe.
Imagine designing a supposedly 'user-friendly' application but not taking into consideration how your audience interacts with your application. This might also be because the default language in most smartphones is English and people are often alien to the fact that you can change it.