Everyday UX: Humans ARE stubborn
When you talk about a good UX experience people are automatically drawn to words like ‘streamline’, ‘quick’ and ‘easy’.
The key word should be ‘predictable’. In the following post I will be looking at human behavior in non online activities. You can’t necessarily compare non-digital user behavior to digital behavior but you can certainly learn from it.
Us humans can be difficult and stubborn when performing day to day activities. One thing us developers/designers can learn from this is how to produce predictable experiences, by understanding how we can adapt an online experience to how a user will want to interact.
“A man will do more for his stubbornness than for his religion or his country.”
— Edgar Watson Howe
When building a site/app it is our job to educate and offer streamlined processes to assist a user in the most efficient way possible. However, sometimes a process to our users may not seem the most efficient but may be the most predictable.
Self Serve Checkouts
Self serve checkouts in shops have been around for a little while now, you can’t deny that they do their job by offering us a ‘quicker’ alternative to buying groceries. Although they do come with their own issues. These issues to us are what the “What’s the deal with airplane peanuts” is to comedians…. everyone’s heard about them.
Recently I was queued up in my supermarket; There were 2 self-serve checkouts and 3 ‘staff operated’ checkouts.
There were 14 people in the queue for the ‘staff operated’ checkouts, and 4 people in the self serve checkouts.
I resisted moving to the self serve checkout just so I could observe the behavior of the people queuing. All 14 people glanced over and considered moving into the quicker queue at least once…. but didn’t.
After much deliberation; in the end I only saw three people leave the queue to join the self-serve queue. Even that was due to a member of staff asking them to do so. They weren’t happy about it either.
There were a few things I learnt from this:
- No matter how much quicker something is, people won’t necessarily do it.
- The people that did join the quicker queue, clearly weren’t happy about having to do so.
- Whether it be part of routine or just simply something that people were used to, the ‘longer’ route to them seemed the safest option. They understood the process and were happy for someone else to scan their items. Also reducing the ‘cognitive load’ by not having to do it themselves… possibly.
- Although the self-serve queue is much quicker, people hesitated. They weren’t sure. They knew what they were used to and decided to stick it out.
- Humans don’t like change, we cling onto our old ways more so than a dog with it’s old half chewed bone.
- Humans are stubborn.
- I heard someone say to their partner ‘don’t go to self serve, always have issues with the baggage area’. Yes, there can be technology faults with these but it shows that after a negative previous experience they were happy waiting that little bit longer as they thought the outcome would be more positive by staying in the longer queue. As far as they were concerned they’ve tried it before. It didn’t meet their expectations so they will stay clear from it from now on.
If you take one thing away from this post, let it be:
don’t assume what your users want. What may seem the most efficient journey to you may not be to them.
It’s down to us to help educate our users through the journey, by showing a clear benefit and guidance along the way. Once a user can complete a journey with no issues, they’ll be more likely to keep using your site. As mentioned above, any negative experiences will hinder the users ability to use your services long term.
“When the trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective.” — Stephen R. Covey
We, as humans have the ability to turn off/hide some emotions. However, trust is one emotion which can easily be damaged. We’re all very fragile deep down. For example, if you own a very friendly cat and one day it bites or scratches you, it’ll take a little while before you forget and start trusting that he/she won’t do it again.
Sometimes it takes a long time and a lot of positive experiences to really gain trust. Trust from our users is one thing that any successful website needs.
I’ll leave this post with the below quote:
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”
— Warren Buffett
Thanks
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