How to Push Beyond Past Bad User Experiences
We love working with companies that are on the forefront of innovation in their industry. It’s exciting to explore uncharted territory with them and help navigate the inevitable product design hurdles.
One hurdle we often encounter is customers’ reluctance to adopt radically new innovations due to past bad user experiences. A product can solve a real problem in an elegant way and be the spitting image of user needs uncovered in concept testing, and yet receive a lukewarm response in later rounds of research.
We’ve found that past disappointing, painful, and frustrating user experiences can create deep skepticism and reluctance to try new things (ie. the poisoned well). In addition, radical innovation often challenges existing mental models and assumptions. This is tough on consumers. When something is truly innovative, it can require a shift in users’ thinking, which has the potential to inhibit adoption.
We’ve seen these challenges emerge with many innovative products and have developed some strategies to push users beyond their past bad experiences and toward adoption of new products.
1. Draw From the Past (Don’t Dwell)
Connect with users by drawing on some of the bad past experiences and connect them to how their experience with your product will be different/better. This makes users feel understood. But, don’t dwell on the past. Your users are probably very familiar with how bad the past experiences and it doesn’t need to be hammered in.
2. Be Kind to Early Adopters
Many users will not have what it takes to be an early adopter of a product that challenges their mental models and assumptions, and that’s okay. There are plenty that will be. Build in ways for your early adopters to evangelize the product for you and benefit from their willingness to believe in your innovation.
3. Build Trust
Customers have heard it all before and are hesitant to believe the claims you make about your product. Building trust will help users be more willing to take a chance on an experience that has disappointed them before. Leverage sources and influencers your customers already trust to help build that initial trusting connection.
4. Be Honest
Overpromising is a sure fire way to lose customers, especially if they’ve been burnt in the past. Be honest about what your product can do and how it is different (and, hopefully, better) than what they’ve experienced in the past.
The foundation of these strategies is user research. In order to successfully apply these principles, you need to understand your users in terms of behavior and motivations, and empathize with them, both about their past experiences and their adoption of your product. Your user experience doesn’t begin and end with your product — how users discover it, learn about it, purchase it, and receive it are all parts of the experience as well.
