Dark Forest At Night

At Intuit, one of the projects I managed was allowing small business owners to send invoices via email. vs via paper.

The product manager said “well most business owners really do want to use paper, but fine, of course we’ll offer the option of email too”.

The designers took that input from the product manager, and designed a solution which “allowed” email.

Our pickup rate was about 5%.

I then worked with the designers directly.

I told them that their UX reminded me of a Disney movie scene set in the dark woods, where there was a sign which said “DO NOT TRESPASS” and then another sign which said “THIS TIME WE MEAN IT”.

We changed the design. Rather than having software which “allowed” email, we designed one which “encouraged” email. One you filled out the invoice amount and description, we asked you for the email address of the customer. You could click to skip that step if you want, but our new UX communicated with confidence that email was the “normal” ways to do things.

Our pickup rate changed to 20%.

Users can “feel” when a design lacks confidence. When a designer thinks that some option might not be in the best interest of a user, but designs it anyway, the user feels that lack of confidence and thus fears use of the new feature.

There are two basic reasons for why a designer wants to encourage a user to use a new feature — because it is in the user’s interest, or because it is in the designer’s company interest. The best software does more of the former, knowing that truly serving users what they want will result in greater usage.

When designers do change a new feature from an “option” to “encouraged” to “default path”, it is important to kill the new feature if you find that most users just skip it. But you’ll never know new feature utility until you get to get users to try it.