Once upon a time I used to focus my efforts on helping my clients create great user experiences. I even wrote a Masters level thesis on User Interfaces and the user experience. Somewhere along the way, I realized that my real passion was in marketing – but those days of architecting usable interfaces comes in handy all the time now. As I review sites, as I help clients promote their online properties, the quality of the user interface still plays a big role. Yet one of the truths that I learned early on was that there are many moments where what a business wants an interface to do is in direct contrast to what a user may want. The most obvious example is an airline ticket site, where a user goal is often to find the cheapest flight from point A to point B. The business goal, of course, is to sell the ticket at the highest price. This is the nature of business vs. user conflicts.
As Internet users, we may complain about a particular user interface, but what many of us don’t realize is that some of these less usable interface choices may be done intentionally. For those wondering how such a situation could be possible, here are just a few ways that some user interfaces suck on purpose and why:
- Preventing core functionality if it loses money – There are always going to be activities online that lose you money. For insurance companies, unfortunately those activities coincide with what customers are often asking for … payouts in relation to medical expenses. Aetna (a major US health insurance provider) has one of the most robust online client centers around. You can check account balances, see all the payments they have made on your behalf, choose doctors and read health content. Yet the one thing you can’t do is submit a claim online – that requires you to print a form with tiny lettering, fill it out and physically mail it to a PO Box. Manufacturer’s rebates are the same way. In both cases, these functions could be offered online – but it just doesn’t pay to make it too easy.
- Locking users into a checkout process – No one likes getting on a road with no exits – particularly if you have taken a wrong turn. Yet Amazon.com and many others insist on locking you into the checkout process once you start it with no links to leave and return, even if you are leaving to add more products to your shopping cart. Letting users bail out doesn’t have to negatively impact conversion – particularly if you let them leave to buy more. But Amazon must have some data to suggest that the lock-in approach works better.
- Getting all users details up front – This is one of the most commonly experienced issues online, a new user being confronted with an overly intimate registration form forcing them to fill in details about their mailing address, security questions, secret words, irrelevant survey questions and more just to become a member of a site. People who are ready to join should feel the most welcome of any user to your site. They want to be a part of your community – it’s your job to let them do it easily. The better solution would be to ask for all the complicated stuff later, and make the registration form as easy as possible.
- Offering barriers to getting full content – NY Times and other media properties have latched onto this model as a way to give users who have not signed in access to only part of the content and require a login (sometimes free, and often paid) to access the rest of the content. The result is a disruptive experience for users. Letting them read content and perhaps introducing a login to comment or read comments on stories may be a different model to consider – and one less likely to lose users.
- Funneling all visitors through the homepage – A disturbing myth that is still prevalent today, this argument is about the necessity of funneling all visitors to a site through the homepage so they get to see the branding and have a "proper" introduction to a site. In most cases, if a visitors ends up at your site via search, this just puts another roadblock between her and the content she is seeking. Let your users go to any page they need and just brand all your pages properly with links back to the homepage.
Of course, not all bad user experiences stem from a business reason. Some are simply due to the inexperience of those who don’t have the skill to make it better, or funded by those who don’t have the money to improve it. But as qualities of a good user interface become more widely accepted, perhaps this group of unintentionally bad user interfaces will start to disappear. Just imagine how much more difficult it would be to get away with a poor user experience online if your customers knew you intentionally chose to leave it that way …
How about confusing and cluttered page designs and click-paths that increase user page views and time-spent metrics? No-one necessarily wants to design that way, but when an opportunity to streamline in-site navigaton occurs, the trade-off between a better user experience and a drop in ad revenues (because of fewer pages and therefore ad impressions) can become, surprisingly, a very controversial topic between designers and business managers….
That’s a great one, Mike. Thanks for sharing!
I apologize ahead of time for the following banter, but I need to vent. I recently have been navigating Aetna’s Navigator website, and I will verify that the interface is sub-par. First off, you cannot access any billing information online. Next, detailed information on your particular policy is either unavailable, or hidden so well that I cannot find it. Also, they have a “customize your plan” section, but this section has only two features that you can customize. The only positive that the website entails(in my opinion) is easy access to the claims information. All of these issues could easily not exist; Aetna has the capabilities to offer all of them and more.
What does all of this mean? I think intentionally diluted customer experiences mean that executives are lying to consumers… that’s shocking.
I’m not sure i agree with the assertion that core functionality is avoided “if it doesn’t pay,” at least with the example presented. Pretty much any online process can and will have a profit point; it’s really more about BPR (business process redesign), implementation constraints, and specific business category issues than profitability.
The example used, filing insurance claims online, misses the issue of business process redesign (in this case, re-tooling order fulfillment to include online) may have a one-off, “fixed” cost, but in a proforma analysis would prove profitable after a specified number of orders or time period.
The point about core functionality being avoided “because it doesn’t pay” can be better proved in the case of Pharmaceuticals, a business category with very specific constraints to online functionality. For example, Pharma companies often are reluctant to implement even a simple email response mechanism via their Web site due to the fear of having “adverse events” reporting. Users report adverse symptoms, which then compels the Pharma company to disclose this information in future marketing communications as part of “fair balance” reporting. This has a potential large cost in future lost sales, etc., so therefore “simple” online functionality is not implemented.