“Easy to use” — On User Experience Flows
(Wrote this draft as an intro to UX flows for a leading media publication in January 2017 when they asked me to cover technology as a series that could appeal to a college-y audience. Haven’t heard back from them since. I guess it’s safe to assume that they won’t publish this anymore. Have deleted names and references to the other posts in the series.)
If you’ve spent any time in South Bangalore, there’s a high probability that you have heard of User experience (UX) design, a buzzword within the tech startup space for a few years now. In our weekly series on technology products, we now get to one part of a UX designer’s role - you’ll know why their role is key to the survival of their organisation. The difference between a good consumer product and a great one is usually a well crafted user experience.
On top of designing how things look — a worthy adventure that needs its own set of posts — a UX designer also defines how things work through designing interactions, flows, optimising the information to fit in with design and business goals — among other things. Visual design is not about what the user sees, but about what the user perceives.
But how could we possibly know what users perceive? Enter data. The global data revolution has given us the ability to measure just about anything users do in apps, and there are good indicators that we could use to explore what might be going on in a user’s thoughts while using the app.
For any existing product that serves a large group of people, we evaluate its current design goals by analysing what the product can be, and what stops us from getting there. We start with the big picture in any business — the potential market for your app. If you’re flipkart, this group includes anyone with the potential to buy products online. Among this group, there is a subset of people who are actually capable of buying products online using flipkart. They have access to internet and a device to order from. These people form the second layer of people in our charts. Of these, a subset actually have your app. That’s layer three. And this goes on, with the next layers including people who actually open the app every month, people who surf for products, people who click the ‘buy’ button, people whose transactions succeed, and people who like your product so much they invite other people to use the app.
One goal of a product designer or a product manager at such a firm is to carry as many people through these layers, so that the company is as close to serving its entire potential market. For instance, Facebook went after anyone with an access to internet over the years, and can now grow exponentially only when internet coverage grows and reaches the rest of the world. This is (one of the reasons) why they now focus on ‘connecting the world’, with initiatives like the controversial internet.org / free basics.
When we check the data collected by apps, we see that people ‘drop out’ when they move between the aforementioned layers. This happens not only when you ask them to complete hard tasks or take tough decisions, but also at stages with simple interactions like tapping on a button. Some of these drop offs are unavoidable, as with users who can’t afford the product the company is selling. For those that can afford but choose not to buy, companies work on motivating the users to go ahead with the purchase. That’s why we see apps fighting for exclusive rights to sell the next big gadget or launch the next big book. That’s also why, for better or worse, we see offers and promotion codes and other such tools. All of this is to make us cross that barrier for the first time — make us more motivated to complete that purchase.
Once we’ve paid once and have gone through the hard work of saving our card details on the app, we are a lot likelier to pay again. We might think it can’t be true, and that we are very rational beings, but data collected at every big firm suggests otherwise. We cross that mental hurdle of payments in our head, and it’s suddenly not as much of a problem anymore.
Studies and experiments have found over the years that the reasons why these drop offs occur are more psychological than physical. You might think a long sign up form causes the user to lose motivation to fill all the forms physically, but the drop offs are almost as big with tiny sign up forms too. This is true for everyone from Quora to Twitter.
While eliminating these drop offs is not always possible, they can always be minimised. Websites like Quora reduce drop offs by not having sign up forms and asking us to login with Facebook, reducing our decision to one yes or no.
While Quora can get away with this, Facebook or Google cannot escape the dreaded ‘signup form’. They need to live with the inefficiency (for now) but they do all they can to minimise it greatly. For example, Facebook keeps the form as short as it can, while giving real time feedback on each field you fill, so you don’t have to fill the entire form only to find out at the end that the password had to have at least one capital letter and one special character.
Can someone offering the network Facebook does get away with a terrible form here? Possibly — when the user’s need for the product is so high she doesn’t mind filling a form twice. But then, making users’ journey easier can’t be a bad thing now, can it?
“Two out of every three players in our game dropped off when they had to download 100 MB of game content from our servers before even starting the tutorial,” says a gaming industry pro who publishes hit global games to the Indian mobile audience. “We removed the download drop off point in the beginning and let the gamers start playing. That ensured that player progress was not broken with a download phase till they were properly introduced to the game. This more than doubled the players who stayed and played.”
Dropoffs, in many shapes and sizes, are the UX designer’s worst enemy. It is the voice in the user’s head that tells her it’s not worth moving to the next step on the app. The UX designer’s opponent is thus invisible and what’s worse, it lives on in users’ heads and controls their decisions. How do they fight it then?
By removing the need for users to decide.
They aim to remove or at least reduce the conflicting thoughts that may arise in the user’s head by making things simple and direct, and by reducing the very need for a user to think before she takes the next step in the app.
Unmindful users follow the directions set for them, and are hence the designer’s best friends. This is how users end up scrolling through facebook or twitter all day. The designers don’t want them to get out of the immersive experience by making them take a step back and think. This thinking happens in a variety of scenarios though; like when there are things on the screen the users do not intuitively expect (‘oh I thought this was free’), or when there’s insufficient data to proceed (‘where’s that buy button?’), or when there are equally good options to choose from (‘wait, both brands look alike…’) etc.
While the first two issues can be solved by clear messaging and correct flows, crafting the right options for your users to choose from is an art form. This is why you see bright shiny ‘okay’ buttons and nearly invisible ‘cancel’ buttons. This is also why pricing is so important, especially when it comes to intangible digital goods.
Perhaps the most famous experiment in this area is the Economist’s with their subscription rates.
The number of people choosing the web+print subscription went much higher just because the print subscription was priced to create a perception of an offer. Without the print subscription option (option 2), online subscription at $59 seems like a no brainer. But with the print option, the costliest option suddenly seems like a good deal — and the experiment worked. More people chose the last option in the experiment, and validated why understanding user motivations and their decision processes is not an optional skill for a product designer in the current landscape.
User experience design often draws parallels with psychology because of the above and more, and rightly so. Consumer behavior is best understood and the design built around it most solid when we understand why users make decisions the way they do — when we understand the motivations behind their actions. And we will get into that more on another day.
