Designing experiences for people who want to be somewhere else
What do you do if the person you’re designing for doesn’t want to be there in the first place?
This article was originally presented as a talk at Fjord’s Service Design Breakfast Event, as part of the 2017 Design Canberra Festival.
As designers, artists, companies, we aspire to create products, services or experiences that people use, enjoy and, hopefully love.
So, what do you do if the person you’re designing for doesn’t want to be there in the first place?
What are we talking about?
Let’s think of examples where people typically want to be somewhere else:
- You’ve made a mistake and need to resolve it. Annoyingly you’ve broken your mobile phone screen and you need to get it fixed, or you’ve lost your credit card and you need to report it as stolen. You might kick yourself for being stupid (putting that phone in the back pocket of your jeans or placing the wallet on top of the car after picking up a coffee)and wish you could turn back time. It’s annoying that it happened, and it is doubly so when you think of the amount of time it will take to resolve it.
- Perhaps even more frustrating is when someone else does you wrong. Your internet goes down or you wait inside all day for that delivery that you were told should have arrived between 8:00–10:00 a.m. There’s nothing worse than sitting on the phone to a customer call centre, when you hear “congratulations” and run to your phone on loudspeaker only to hear the rest of the sentence “…your call has progressed in the queue.” Whether it is your fault or somebody else’s, you just want to be someplace else.
Ultimately, we want to design a service that is desirable for people. In the context where a person wants to be somewhere else and interacting with anything but you, we need to redefine desirability. Desirability in this context is perhaps providing the ability to let someone complete a task and allow them to leave as quickly as possible.
So how do we do this?
Designing for desirability
It’s important to understand human behaviour in context to design for people. In the video, imagine this is your standard gym or cable TV subscriber, they come in as easily as possible, learn all about the service and then sign up.
But when things go wrong, or their situations change, they need to exit as quickly as possible. But the barriers come up and they don’t get any assistance.
As in the video, simple tasks are difficult to complete, and a person becomes easily overwhelmed and confused.
So how do we design for people who are in this funk?
While it’s not a stressful situation, waiting for an age before you can watch a movie isn’t a great experience. However, with Australian internet and the NBN, we are often faced with a message like this:
Is there anything worse? You’ve just rented a movie, sat down on the couch perhaps with a bucket of popcorn and you have to wait 13 minutes before you can watch the film. Although the designers have provided an option to view the movie sooner by changing the resolution, as a user there’s not a lot more you can do here whilst you are waiting for your movie to load.
Buffering is very annoying but having no internet connection is even worse. Using Google Chrome there is a hidden feature when you have no internet connection. If you press the space bar it starts a game where you control a dinosaur that jumps obstacles as he runs along. This is great design, the designers have thought about context and established that people want to be doing something whilst they wait for their internet to work.
Understanding the mindset of people
When things are going wrong you need to design for everyone, from people who just need to take a break through to those that want to leave and are highly stressed. When people are stressed they don’t read, they act on impulse, need support and are emotional. Ultimately this means they are blinkered and not in a rational state of mind.
Provide information which is written in clear English, considered, rational and instructive so it outlines what a user needs to do next.
How do you research this?
When designing an experience, it is essential that you empathize not only with the user but with the context too.
As you can see in the video it is very difficult to conduct research when people are stressed or anxious.
It may be better to talk after the fact and once the dust has settled. As researchers, one very valuable method we often use is to interview stakeholders and visit customer call centres. This is a great way to understand the common pain points and frustrations of the process.
When conducting research, it is essential to identify what jobs the user needs to complete and understand their mindset when they interact with the app, product or service. In order to improve the experience we need to appreciate the journey they undertake, what they were thinking at the time and what would have helped them in that situation.
Don’t make any assumptions; people are complex and unpredictable
Sometimes people enjoy having to complete extra steps to complete a task. Sounds weird right? Whilst doing some research for a music streaming service in the UK, one participant we interviewed didn’t want to use an online service as he liked creating his own music catalogue. He would sample his record collection, separate the tracks, name them and archive them. When we asked why he was doing this it became apparent it was a task which he had developed into a hobby. The digital service offered nothing for him, but it would have saved a lot of time. In short, the motivation and needs of someone might seem obvious on the surface but could be anything but.
How can we make a good exit experience?
So, if the person who you are dealing with doesn’t want to be there, or wants to break up with you, what do you do?
Like with the video of the bank robber, people want to get in and out as quickly as possible and we should help them (perhaps not in the case of bank robbers!). Without conducting comprehensive research, it is difficult to understand the needs and behaviours of everyone, but it’s definitely a start.
How you deal with people in a stressful situation can make a big impact on how they perceive you later and can enhance your brand, rather than detract from it. There are many different mindsets that your audience might have when they want to leave from just wanting to take a break through to incredibly stressed.
Ultimately, they may come back to you if you treat them right.
When Apple Music was released, I signed up for a free trial and cancelled my Spotify premium paid subscription. I’d been a member for a number of years but didn’t see the point of paying for something I was getting for free. Shortly after cancelling my Spotify subscription, an email appeared in my inbox from Spotify with a simple message and a link to a song, “I want you back” by The Jackson 5. A nice touch and one that made me smile.
After a period of time and on reflection, I didn’t get on with Apple Music. So I decided to sign up for the Spotify premium account once more. Along with being able to quickly reactivate my account, I could re-access all my settings, plus I didn’t have to complete any of the onboarding or set-up process.
Wouldn’t it be great if every service was as easy and low friction as this? Think of those gyms once again, they’re very easy to sign up to, but impossible to leave. If in a few months after you eventually quit they asked to come back, would you? It would probably feel like a trap.
Jakob Nielsen, who is like the godfather of usability, has a series of usability heuristics for user interface design. One key heuristic is to provide a user control and freedom, I have applied this and reinterpreted it to the context of wanting to be somewhere else:
“Users need an ‘emergency exit’ to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. The system should support an undo and redo.”
Or when it comes to products and services they should be able to leave and come back later if they need to (i.e. undo and redo).
You can’t make everyone happy, but you can make it easy for them
Sometimes people want to be somewhere else and have had enough of your product or service, and that’s ok. But if they don’t want to be there…
- Make it easy for them and allow them to get in and out and complete their tasks as quickly as possible
- Conduct research to know what they are going through in order to understand their needs
- Design for empathy and consider context to provide a consistent experience which treats them with respect and compassion
