Fit and Finish: Insight from the Ironworks User Experience Group

Service Design and the Customer’s Journey

Call it by other names – multi-channel service design, customer relationship management, cross-channel experience design, customer experience.  We’re talking about how people interact with a whole system, over time.  

My Alarm Clock Keeps Getting Smarter

Sometimes it's good to take a step back and admire the small things in life. We all know the details matter, but we take so much for granted. Case in point: your alarm clock.

What a boring gadget. It's sole purpose is to pull you from the depths of a cozy slumber, to absorb its weight in unfiltered hatred and well-aimed smacks to the sleep button. That poor little plastic guy doesn't get a lot of love. And I got no defense for that.

Familiarity Breeds Contentment

Imagine trading in your car for a new one from a different manufacturer. Your new car has the gas pedal on the left and the brake on the right. In order to activate the turn signal, you need to push a button near the radio. Oh and the radio station is not something you can control at all.

Not a pretty picture, is it?

There's a reason the keyboard I'm using to type this has the keys arranged in a certain order. There's a reason hot water is (usually) on the left and cold on the right. As humans interact with the world around us, and this includes tools, technology, gadgets and household items we use, we’ve developed expectations and conventions for how things should work. We expect flipping a switch “up” will turn something “on.” A magazine should open on the right and contain a table of contents. A TV remote should have a simple "up-down" way to adjust the volume.

On the web, most people know how to operate a drop-down box and a text entry field. But these were new and different to people at first. Other usability conventions that have been established online include underlined or colored text used to represent a hyperlink, the ability to click the logo to return to the homepage, the concept of "on-state" buttons, breadcrumb navigation, tag clouds, etc. As with other products, the best ideas get copied and improved upon. Over time this leads to increased user familiarity and higher expectations for the online experience.

Designers of products (and websites) need to decide when to follow these relatively established best practices and when to blaze a new-user-experience trail. The best websites are often a combination of both. The danger of course is that a lack of familiarity with how something works, even if the design is "better," can often lead to usability problems. Often users become accustomed to how something works and they resist change. An example of "better-designed but less-adopted" systems could be the Dvorak Keyboard or the Metric System in America.

As a general rule conventions should be broken in order to make things simpler for the user, not more complicated. After all, that’s how conventions become conventions. Your website doing something differently has little value to the end user. Your website doing something better is what it’s all about.

It’s interesting how our usability conventions and expectations change over time. My children may never have the need to use a rotary phone or actually “roll” a car window down. They are digital natives with their own expectations about technology. But as the success of the iPhone and iPad user interface has shown us, we are willing to reconsider our established assumptions when shown a better way to do things. And as time and technology march on, we will continue to learn new ways to interact with our world and establish new usability expectations.