Experience Regression — I
As a design product team we often embark on journey to revamp the existing experience, or features.
Re-design is a twin edged sword in the product teams arsenal.
It can on one end help the team reach its design goals, improve business prospects, and on the other extreme end push the business backwards, move your Net promoter score down and maybe even make your users think about leaving your product for your competitors products.
In this Post — I am trying to go over the reasons to be cautious about redesign efforts for products in digital realm. This includes why understanding user mental model is important, understand why product teams drive towards redesign efforts, how important it is to make interfaces predictable, taking the call about — how much to change.
Reasons for being cautious
My interpretation of an Operating system redesign nightmare — the user mental model.
From Snapchat, to Microsoft, to hundreds of digital products that have their users hit the wall of frustration, as the new interface seems puzzling, having a completely new workflow, not able to find the most common aspects they are familiar with.
Let me take the example of an Operation System design overhaul. At the time of the the start menu redesign, I had a completely different view point of the redesign. I felt they were going in great direction.
I went through the videos, with awe about what was being done. I was already using a windows mobile phone, and liking the flat icon strategy, and everything else planned with it. I thought this was going to rock the world. I was not even in Microsoft and thought they would win.
Boom. Almost every other user was not able to find the start menu button with the new upgrade. A much touted redesign came grindingly to halt. The news was abuzz with the redesign fail. I shared the sentiment, the design teams that helped design the product might have felt.
Basically what this meant — The users mental model was evidently very different from the product teams thought process and designers like me.
There are many more stories, from snapchat to every enterprise redesign — when you shift the users mental model, it’s almost like switching you handle bars functionality on our doors — the frustration of not being able to understand how it works — completely reduces the amazing features it might hold.
Simplification might be dangerous in one big package
Some times it is difficult to change the way users work. The original software might not have been designed in a optimum manner in the first place, but changing it in a big band release, might be dangerous.
Another example i can site, is of a, software major, that wanted to philosophically reinvent the way their software solved business problems.
The company believed that reducing features would actually lead to better adoption. Possibly most of us would even agree with this line of thinking.
The product was carefully crafted after months and years of diligent effort, leading up to a big bang release. The big release did happen, but it was disappointing to see how the users reacted to the release.
Eagerness to redesign
How much to change
When faced with a large redesign challenge encompassing large units, it might make sense to have a common board to understand what direction the body of design is making across.
Status-quo change vs. improvements need to understood well to have the right measured impact on business.
Semantics and interaction design
A simpler example could be a recent redesign in an enterprise product i used to use so often. The redesign actually meant the navigation was all revamped. I just couldn’t find the preferences anymore. I clicked and clicked — and then carefully clicked every button to only later find it — the preferences term had been changed to settings.
Predictability the holy grail of redesign
It turns out - I don’t like redesigns that I cannot predict.
A brand new revamp of the navigation often made the users look back at the help pages, the company even enforced a learning model for the employees, helping them learn, how to navigate the interface. In the net, the business rules were the same, maybe there was just enhancement of functionality. Why did this have to be so difficult to use.
You can get away with and do great with change, as long as you are predictable. In other words users are able to understand what has changed.
Asking a few questions often help,
- how did I get here
- where can I go from here
- what can I do here
How do you measure
In my recent past NPS scores have gained great prominence, to get a quick gist of how users feel about the product.
