The One Best Way

In conversations with others in my profession, I've been struck by how distressingly many of them subscribe to the notion that there can be only one best way to accomplish anything, and that our goal in designing user experience is to discover it and force it upon as many people as possible. This is, I think, a very dangerous assumption that leads many designers down the wrong road, and causes a great deal of frustration for consumers.

The metaphor I've been using lately is the notion of obtaining a meal. There are various levels of service that can be provided:

• A supermarket sells all the ingredients necessary, but it is up to the customer to decide what to buy and prepare the meal. This is too often dismissed as old-fashioned and not very user- friendly.
• Arguably, a higher level of service can be provided by selling a "kit" that contains all the necessarily ingredients, so that the customer can grab one package and go. This saves them the effort of consulting a cookbook and making a list, and finding the individual items they need.
• Even better, a company can prepare the food, seal it in a vacuum pouch, so that the customer can buy the item, toss it in the microwave to warm it up, and have the meal they want with a minimum of fuss and bother.
• Better still, the customer could phone in the order, pick up the item at the deli counter, hot and ready to eat.
• To go a step further, a delivery truck could arrive at the customer's location and hand over a packaged meal, complete with disposable plates and plastic utensils to save the washing up.
• Or better still, the food could be ground into a slurry, loaded into a caulking gun, and the delivery service could tube-feed the customers to save them the trouble of chewing the food.

It might seem that I went a little too far with that last one, but it's not as ridiculous as it might seem: it would be a great service for people who are disabled and unable to feed themselves. And I expect there are some people who, while capable of feeding themselves, would welcome the convenience and denounce anyone who failed to take advantage of such a service as old-fashioned. You never know what's going to catch on, when it comes to trends in consumer preferences.

The point I'm getting at is that there are various levels of service you can provide, in any industry, and that while you can arrive at the easiest, cheapest, and most effortless way for a customer to obtain the benefit they seek, not all customers will want that.

Some customers prefer to follow their own recipe, buy the individual ingredients, and prepare their own meal. And while it's more labor-intensive to do things any other way, not all customers care to be tube-fed. What's more, even a single customer might want different levels of service at different times. A customer who usually prefers the convenience of a microwave-ready meal might sometimes prefer to dine in a restaurant, and at other times, they may prefer to do things the "hard" way for the sake of quality.

In the end, there is no "one best way" for all customers, at all times - and I would argue (and have argued) that the approach to user experience design should accommodate the various methods by which customers care to be served. The approach of finding the "best" way, to the exclusion of all other options, will alienate the customers who prefer a different level of service - and drive them to a competitor who is more flexible in giving customers the freedom to choose for themselves.