Can I tell you a little story of my idiocy?
We all make stupid mistakes sometimes, and I am no exception. Neither are your users, and we need to be prepared for that, as my story demonstrates.
Like most people, I put on some weight over Christmas that I decided I need to shed come January. So I decided to sign up to Weight Watchers.
I signed up on their website to a monthly rolling contract because I am a realist and I knew that although a longer tie in would give me a lower monthly price, there was a good chance I would give up before the end of the contract.
Sure enough, only a few weeks later, I had fallen off the dieting wagon and was ready to quit. However, this is where things started to go wrong for the user experience.
Although I could quickly sign up online, Weight Watchers forced me to call them to unsubscribe. That immediately put my back up as this is a classic dark pattern. They knew that many people wouldn’t bother unsubscribing if they knew they had to wait on hold.
However, in what showed a lot more commitment than my willingness to diet, I did call them, and sat on hold almost to my breaking point.
When I did eventually get through to somebody, the Weight Watcher representative informed me that I had accidentally signed up for a six-month contract, I couldn’t cancel my account until the end. I had made a mistake.
It was very obviously my mistake too. When I looked at the signup page again, it was clear I had made the wrong selection, which shows how stupid people can be when under cognitive load. I had got it wrong.
I very politely explained to Weight Watchers that I had made a mistake and asked them to allow me to leave my contract anyway. They point-blank refused. Even escalating it to the supervisor didn’t help. They were going to hold me to the letter of the agreement.
Now, they were, of course, entirely within their rights. They had not tricked or manipulated me. I had made a mistake. But it left me frustrated and irritated by Weight Watchers. It had soured the relationship, and you can be sure I won’t be joining them again next Christmas.
So what lessons can we learn from this experience?
Users Will Make Mistakes
First, we can recognise that users will regularly make mistakes. Mistakes that would seem absurd to those of us building the websites. Even the most well-informed user will make mistakes if they rush or are distracted. We need to design for this.
Yes, weight watchers clearly stated that it was a six-month subscription, but I still missed it. I saw the highlighted box and associated button and just clicked it because it had the lowest price. The design intentionally nudged me towards this option.
I don’t have a problem with a design highlighting one option over another like this. However, if you do nudge the user in a specific direction, it is essential to consider the consequences.
If your design choices lead to users making mistakes, that will cost the business. It cost weight watchers financially in call centre costs and reputation, as I have shared my experience with many other people (including here).
However, there is a bigger question here. One that every designer, developer or product owner should be asking themselves — how easy are you making it for a user to undo their mistakes?
Can Users Undo Their Mistakes?
It is a question that applies to mistakes like my error with Weight Watchers, but also small mistakes, like mistyping a postcode or entering a password incorrectly.
Too often, our focus is on the optimal experience, when everything goes well. Instead, we should be asking ourselves how we are going to support a user when they do everything wrong. We also need to be testing for that.
Take, for example, the Weight Watcher’s page where I made the wrong selection. If they had tested that by running usability testing, they still probably wouldn’t have flagged it as an issue.
That is because, in a usability test session, you have participants full attention. You are often paying them to complete the task, and they are almost always doing it in a quiet room with no distractions.
By contrast, I completed that page while sitting in the car, talking to my wife. That is the real world, and we need to be designing for that experience.
Questions You Should Be Asking
So, the next time you work on an interface ask yourself four questions:
- How could a user misunderstand this?
- What can I do to reduce the chance of that happening?
- How can I help the user recover if they make a mistake?
- How can I test whether users are likely to make mistakes? It’s not exactly rocket science, but we tend to overlook these questions in the heat of a project, and it can significantly cost a company.
Until next time.
