The User Experience – How Not To Provide a Good User Experience Part 1

One of my mantras is that people who design things should be required to use them for at least 6 months. Every time I encounter a web site, application or any other user interface that defies all logic, I have to wonder if the person(s) who designed it ever actually tried to use it for the purpose for which it was intended. In most cases, I’m betting the answer is no.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of examples of poor user interface design and very few that can be considered good user interface design. User interface design is an art and a science, just like programming. Really good user interfaces provide a pleasurable user experience and brilliant user interface design is so intuitive that the user can just pick up the device, or run the application, or visit the website and get around in it as though they’d been using it all their lives.

Obviously, that’s the ideal and it’s very rarely achieved. For one thing, different people prefer different things in a design, and for another, it’s extremely difficult to provide a truly seamless experience for the majority of users. There is almost always something that requires the user to get used to the way the interface works, but of course, the goal is to have as few of those as possible.

So, now that we’ve established what the ideal is, we’ll be looking at various examples of bad user interfaces from time to time. It happens to be one of my pet peeves and as a result I seem to encounter them on a regular basis. Sure, maybe I’m too picky, but I’ve gotten to where my time is too valuable to be spent trying to figure out what the designer was thinking when they implemented the particular interface that’s driving me up the wall.

Here’s one I encountered recently. I have a frequent flyer account with a major airline that has accumulated some 22,000 miles. I haven’t flown for going on two years now, so the account has been sitting there idle. The airline has decreed that if the account sits idle too long, they’re going to deactivate it and I lose my miles.

Okay, I have no beef with that. They gave me a deadline and said I had to either have some activity in the account or pay them $25 by that date or my account would be closed. The email that I got on this subject gave me several alternative ways of contacting them to pay my $25 one of which was a link to their web site. I like doing things online so I clicked that link.

After digging up my user ID and password out of the archives, I managed to get logged into the account and tried to navigate to the link given. I got an error 404 – page not found. I spent a bit of time surfing around their site looking for anything that looked promising, but found nothing. So, I went to the “Contact Us” page and sent them an email asking the whereabouts of the page referenced in their email.

A day or so later, I got a response that said, in essence, “Oh, that page doesn’t actually exist. You can call the 1-800 number to pay your $25 and keep your account active.” Gosh, thanks, guys. If I’d have wanted to call, I’d have done so in the first place and avoided this whole problem. I have to assume that the designer of this particular campaign did just that: assumed that everyone would call and only tested that scenario: “Hey, it worked when I tried it.”

So, I called the 1-800 number and got a very nice lady on the line who didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. She put me on hold for several minutes while she went to find out what was up with this $25 deal. Upon her return, she announced that I could accomplish the same goal by going to their web store and buying something there. Purchasing anything via the web store adds miles to my account which constitutes activity which would keep my account open until the next deadline.

Peachy. The only problem with that was: A) that wasn’t specified as an option in the deadline email (they only referred to “activity in the account”), and B) I’d be paying about double what I’d pay from most any other outlet for the same item if I bought it through their web store.

I told the nice lady that I really didn’t want to shop in the online store and that I was perfectly happy to pay the $25 and resolve this issue for another year or two. Back on hold I go while she checks into how to actually put this into the computer. Some time later she’s back and we spend another 10 minutes or so navigating the computer system until she finally gets the info entered and my card charged and a confirmation number spewed forth.

Apparently, the concept of someone actually wanting to pay them $25 to keep their miles active was so far from the process designer’s mind that they hadn’t bothered to actually test the process to see if it worked. Somebody managed to get it into the requirements, very possibly as an afterthought, and the implementers blew it off as so unlikely as to not need any real testing. They threw the link into the email to meet the requirement and left it at that.

The lesson here is obvious: if you’re going to provide a path down which a user can go, make sure it actually goes where the user wants to go. This applies to programming, web site design and any other discipline where a user has to interact with your product. Making your product easy to use should be a top priority right along with making it work correctly. Given the choice of two products, one of which is easy to figure out and use, if the other is a beast, consumers who are aware of both products will choose the easy one every time.

John The Geek

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