This content originally appeared on Adam Silver and was authored by Adam Silver
Two weeks ago, a new subscriber asked me:
How can we bring joy to people who use enterprise applications for 40 hours a week?
It’s a good question because it shows empathy for people who use the same product day in and day out.
If you can bring users joy, you should.
But it all boils down to what you mean by joy. If you mean surprise or entertainment, then you’re focusing on the wrong problem – because that’s not a real problem.
Take JIRA, the enterprise project management tool.
All you want to do is create, track and progress tickets.
If you nail this, you give users joy.
If you don’t, you don’t.
In fact, you just piss users off; something I can attest to having attended a million retros over the years and hearing fellow colleagues saying things like:
- “I just created a ticket and I can’t find it”
- “How do you assign multiple people to a ticket”
- “I can’t find the ticket about removing the accordion” (this one is me on a regular basis)
The only joy you get from JIRA is when you close the browser tab and pretend you don’t have to use it.
In my course, Form Design Mastery, I share the 3 laws of form design, the first of which states:
Nobody wants to use your form
I wrote this law because I sometimes get asked about ways to make forms more engaging or joyful.
My answer is no different to this email because JIRA, like most digital products, is full of forms:
- Creating a ticket is a form
- Updating a ticket is a form
- Finding a ticket is a form
- Assigning a teammate is a form
So it’s fair to say that:
You can’t have a well designed product without a well designed form.
The truth is:
Users don’t care about forms – they just care about the outcome of having used one.
This is crucial to understand because it emphasises the idea of respecting the user over trying to make your form fun, engaging, novel or “on brand”.
And respecting the user means doing everything we possibly can to get that form out of the way as quickly as possible.
In the case of JIRA, you just want to create the ticket and get back to work.
If you’d like to design forms that indirectly bring users joy by getting completely and utterly out of the way:
This content originally appeared on Adam Silver and was authored by Adam Silver
Adam Silver | Sciencx (2025-07-21T00:00:00+00:00) My first law of form design. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/07/21/my-first-law-of-form-design/
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