In looking through comments about films, I noticed two
reviews (which were really descriptions of personal experiences) of the same
film:
- An individual who thought the film looked interesting, but who stopped watching after about half an hour because she found it to be unengaging
- Another individual who was not interested in the film, but sat down to watch it with friends, and found himself drawn into it after a while
Neither of these experiences is unusual, but their
juxtaposition got my wheels turning on a basic problem with the design of
customer experiences. Specifically, it is assumed that people have a good sense
of what interests them, and it is also assumed that they remain interested
throughout an experience once they have engaged in it.
The two comments above, while seemingly opposite, are
actually quite the same in one regard: a person failed to accurately predict
whether they would find something engaging and enjoyable. Whether they thought they would not and then did, or thought that they would but then did not, it is a clear
misidentification of one’s own interests.
This leads to a third and more troubling problem for
experience design: the assumption that the moment a person who drops out of a
flow has encountered an obstruction that caused them to suddenly become
disinterested in completing the task.
There may be nothing at all wrong with the activity, merely that the
person recognized only after beginning the task that it was not something that interested
him – and that his initial prediction of interest was wrong.
Granted, there are instances in which there actually is a
problem: there’s an awkward phrase that makes it difficult to understand how to
perform a task or causes an individual to become anxious about whether what
they are doing will achieve the outcome that is expected. But there are also instances in which a
person’s interest simply wanes, and would wane no matter what was done with the
experience.
A good example of this would be the “landing pages” that are
created for online advertising: when a person clicks an ad, they arrive at a
page that is custom-built for their presumed interest based on the
advertisement they clicked. The bounce
rate for these pages is extremely high and no-one has yet developed a reliable
solution to the problem that applies in all instances. That is, there is
nothing about the landing page that is scaring people away – but they came to
the realization, after clicking through, that they really were not interested
in the offer.
This seems like something that would be difficult to
validate, as it is impossible to determine the real reason that someone decides
to take an action (or desist from taking what we perceive to be the next action
in a natural sequence) – and it also seems to lend itself to apathy, in that if
we accept that it’s all up to the customer and we have no power to influence
them, we may allow valid problems to fester.
But it does support the notion that sometimes there’s just
nothing to “fix” and tinkering with the experience would do more harm than
good. Ultimately, we can derive intent
from behavior, and it is likely that the instances in which an individual’s misestimating
their own interest has a much smaller impact than a valid issue. In all, it may deserve a bit more
consideration.
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