There are many factors to consider when designing some bad user experience, but the most important thing is to figure out where the bottom line is.
After doing user experience for so long, I found a huge lie , that is – “if the user experience of the product is the best, users will choose it”.
Why do you say that?
This sentence is actually not much different from the nature of “I am good enough to a girl, she will like me”. It’s like a common scene in our lives and in movies and TV dramas: a woman rejects a warm man who takes care of her meticulously, and chooses to be with a man who may not be very good to her.
Often we will see some products with excellent user experience end in dismal end (@XXhao’s XX Technology). Does that mean user experience doesn’t matter? What about user experience design?
The first thing to be clear here is not to cover up the lack of core capabilities or the loss of cost control in the name of user experience. Enterprises must survive first, solve problems below 60 points, and then consider problems with more than 60 points after they are solved.
Secondly, the user experience itself is a neutral word, which refers to a feeling of the user in the process of using the product. This feeling can be joyful, nervous, introspective, or even frightened. All choices made by users in the process of using the product will be affected by user experience design. It’s like an invisible hand that manipulates the user’s every action in the online world (please remember to autoplay the next video and let you watch how much you didn’t intend to watch).
Therefore, user experience design is not only about making a product fully meet the needs of users, but also responsible for manipulating users to do various things that companies expect to happen. Most of these designs are considered by users to be “bad” user experience. .
You see, no matter where you go, good and bad always happen at the same time, just like yin and yang. However, just knowing good user experience is one-sided, simple and naive .
Then someone said, “Cut, it’s not easy to do it well, you can do it for me, it will make it ugly to the sky in one minute.”
There is a cognitive difference in this sentence. “Poor user experience” does not mean “trouble”. Its core is to let users execute content beyond the plan , but there are many forms of expression, and it can also look like It is beautiful or fashionable (please recall the BMW advertisement in your circle of friends), or it may be very direct and rude (please download and experience various activity tips in Pinduoduo). But no matter which one it is, it needs to meet the core requirements and try to be as elegant as possible.
What are the circumstances of a “bad” user experience?
First, let’s talk about cost. Because user experience has a cost, this cost must be reasonable and scientific. The “bad” user experience caused by cost issues is often more comprehensive, and there may be certain problems in functional completeness and product usability.
For example: Didi’s early app interface and experience were not perfect, full of loopholes. Because the initial version of the product focused on the core functionality of how to increase the number of drivers and the number of orders.
But products are useful and valuable to users, and it is precisely because of this that users choose Didi, which is not so good-looking.
The second is security. Security itself is contrary to the ease of use of the product. The higher the security requirements, the worse the ease of use of the product.
For example, in a login system, when the user enters the wrong password 3 times, the user will be asked to enter the verification code, and the account will be locked for half an hour after 10 mistakes. If the user forgets the password, this rule is a nightmare for the user. I myself have suffered from locked passwords. But it is precisely such a “bad” user experience that ensures the security of user accounts and will not be easily cracked by others.
Similarly, there is a recent popular game “Let’s Catch Demons Together”. If a user is playing a game while walking, it will prompt the user to stop before continuing the game. Such a design is very painful for the user who is playing the game. Because no one wants to be interrupted when they are in a state of immersion. But such a “bad” user experience for a sports game, on the one hand, protects the player’s life safety in the traffic environment, and on the other hand, tries to avoid the player’s legal liability for injuries caused by playing games, thus making This game can go further.
The third is to take into account the ethics and morals of the products. Judging from the youth mode launched by video products such as “Douyin” and “Bilibili”, and the forced offline of various games for a fixed time, these functions are constantly restricting users. to use the product itself. For users, this is undoubtedly destroying the user experience, but from the perspective of reflection, humans need to spend more time in the real world instead of indulging in self-pleasure, and the product itself should also undertake to help users get rid of excessive The state of being immersed in a virtual world.
It can also be seen from the newly launched anti-addiction mode of Apple and Android systems (the mobile phone will be locked or grayed out when the mobile phone is used for a certain period of time), the user experience is also responsible for alerting users, rather than blindly catering to users.
In the end, there is a “bad” user experience designed for business purposes. There are many application scenarios, such as reducing the user’s bounce rate, increasing the page conversion rate, increasing the click rate of a function, etc., but the design routines used generally cannot escape the following three:
- induce choice;
- misleading operations;
- Manufacturing difficulty.
Let’s talk about the first one. Induced choices are generally implemented from the product’s operation strategy to the interface experience. Judging from JD.com’s 618 activity rules, its design is complex enough for me to complain about the next Double 11. Why JD.com and Taobao? The e-commerce of the company is unwilling to make the design of the preferential activities simpler and the threshold lower? As long as you reach 200, subtract 50. Isn’t this simple rule easier to understand? Why do you have to buy a certain amount of money under a certain category to participate in the discount?
The reason for this is that, on the one hand, many users with high consumption expectations will directly choose to buy when the price is high, and make reasonable use of price discrimination to obtain a higher transaction unit price. On the other hand, for users who care about discounts, they originally planned to buy only 300 yuan of daily necessities, but in the end, in order to participate in the full reduction, they bought 300 shampoo, tissue paper, etc. (I am talking about myself).
The second kind of misleading operation uses the user’s mentality to make the user click the button with the opposite meaning. Generally, when the core interests of the product are touched, the design of such misleading operations is more common. For example, in the deposit refund function of various types of shared bicycles, the “non-refundable” button is made dark in the second confirmation, and the “refund” button is almost invisible. Users generally think that the dark button is subconscious. is the confirmation key. The result of this design is that some users lose patience after a few wrong operations and decide to quit next time. Because in marginal choices, users’ decisions are often impatient.
The third is the difficulty of manufacturing , through which the purpose of reducing the frequency of use of a certain function is achieved. Now many apps have made small programs, but some functions that users think are important are often castrated in small programs. For example, withdrawing cash, refunding deposits, canceling accounts, etc., if you need to use these functions, you have to download the complete application, and in the complete application, the level of these functions cannot be expressed by depth, but by fans.
In ofo’s deposit refund function, I have searched for it no less than ten times, and finally found it in a place similar to a settings icon in the upper right corner. The deposit refund function is placed in the settings, who would dare to think.
The above are probably some of the reasons for a “bad” user experience. In fact, as a product designer, my job is to constantly balance user and business interests. The most difficult part is to find the balance point in the middle. If it is too biased towards users, the enterprise is equivalent to doing public welfare; if it is too biased towards the enterprise, the tragedy of the “Wei Zexi Incident” may occur.
We can design a “bad” user experience, but we must figure out where the bottom line is .
