Secondary user experience
Designing for your users’ users
After my iron recently exploded, I went to a local department store to find a new one. They had a few good offers on, so I selected a fancy-looking iron with lots of features that I didn’t understand, and took it to the till to pay.
The cashier, scanned my item and told me how much I needed to pay. I did that weird ‘can-I-pay-by-card-please’ gesture that us Brits do – a sort of taking-a-card-out-of-a-wallet-and-waving-it-at-a-card-machine mime, with a quiet mumbling of “can I card the card machine with a card?”.
This is when the trouble started.
Using muscle memory, the cashier hit a few buttons on the till and the cash drawer popped open. She looked at me. “Ah,”, she exclaimed in mild annoyance, “I’ve pressed the button for cash, not card. Sorry, just a moment”. She shouted over to another lady manning a nearby till.
“I’ve just pressed cash when I meant to press card. How do I cancel it?”
“I don’t think you can.”
“What if I put it through, and then cancel it, then put it through again?”
“Yes you can do that, but you’ll need to ask the manager.”
Of course, she used the manager’s name, rather than ‘the manager’. I just can’t remember her name.
The cashier, now having apologised to me twice already, calls for a manager, who arrives a few minutes later.
“I’ve just pressed cash when I meant to press card. What do we do?”
“Has the gentleman paid anything yet?”
“No.”
“Then put that one through, give me the receipt and I’ll refund it. Then we’ll just put it through again.”
The cashier clicks another few buttons, then starts over. The box is scanned, I’m told the total, and this time, the card machine flashes. Everything goes as expected from here. I’m leaving the shop shortly afterwards with what I assume is quite a good iron, but it’s taken me easily four times longer than it should have. My overall experience is diminished, I feel slightly frustrated and annoyed.
I’ve lost confidence in this interface.
Have you ever heard someone say ‘It doesn’t matter what the interface looks like because it’s only our staff that use it”, or similar?
Here's why it matters.
When we design products, we design them for our customers, or users. We take business case, functionality and aesthetics into account when we create our designs. What is often overlooked is the actual end result effect, which often has far reaching consequences beyond our initial impressions.
Sometimes, we design for the customers of our customers – even when they will never interact with our design.
If that till had a simple undo function, an incredibly important usability heuristic, I would have been out of the building and ironing shirts in no time. Not only has it affected the till’s user – the cashier – but me, too.
Ever called into a call centre and been told “I’m sorry, our system is very slow today”? Inevitably leading to a terrible joke about it being Monday and having to give it some leeway, or some nonsense? That customer service advisor might be frustrated, but you can be sure their caller is far more irritated and willing to share that annoyance with the suddenly rather convenient, faceless, unfortunate corporate drone they’re holding to their raging mouth.
On a more serious note, this is especially important because interactions between service employees and their customers has a direct impact on how they perceive the product and the company as a whole. [Gounaris 2008]
All this highlights the importance of a well thought out product design, using flow, user & sentiment analysis. Looking at the experience flows through a product in detail, and considering all the knock-on implications of those touch points, could help to reduce annoyance of those secondary users, and in turn, give your product better favour with your primary customers too.
And on that note, I have ironing to do.
Thanks for reading.
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Tom Haczewski (that’s pronounced hatch-eff-skee) runs Norwich-based UX & usability consultancy The User Story.
