Pondering Poor UX
It’s kind of hard to believe these days that poor user experience that can hinder your website would be developed and deployed. But it happens — all the time. Its just a testament to how difficult UX is to understand.
Recently I was on an artificial sweetener website. I could not, for the life of me, find their products. Across the top menu they had “About Us, Lifestyle, Recipes, Community”. Nothing, NOTHING on the home page to list the products. I was forced to change a page and scroll down to find a category called “products.” And it was listed third in that page menu on the left!
The site’s retail home page literally did not have a link to its own product list.
I see this all the time. Now, while I am no UX expert, I do consider my self an expert use-er. It means, I know what I want when I go to a site and if I am overly inconvenienced I bail out.
What causes this? Having sat on a few of the meetings with people who uh, design this stuff (usually I’m just working on the engine code so I get no say) I observe this:
- No talent to design. Serious. Design is measured subjectively so often, this always slips by.
- Failure to understand the user. Usually this manifests itself by the application team using their domain language in meetings, thinking the user knows the same domain language. They do not.
- Too complex. It may be a designer, a pm, or a developer but they want to flex their technical muscle.
- Failure to understand the mission of the company. That’s right — what the hell are you trying to do with the site?
There are some ways to get around this, a few solutions:
- AB testing for your pages.
- Full blown web analytics.
- An experienced UX team AND you listen to them.
- A good set of missions statements/grounding for the project team.
That’s just a few.
These days companies are trying to re-invent the user experience, Personally I think it fails more often than not. One redesign I would be curious to see stats on is Target’s new site. Personally, I think it was a step back, and, it loads very very slow and you have to scroll like a madman on the home page. I think they were trying to get away from the standard, Amazon, but sorry that pattern is laid down. People like it, it works.
A site years ago, Campmor, used to have an almost Craig’s-list appearance. It was unique in that you could drill and filter to products quickly. They “updated” and made it Web-2-oh-ish. And I stopped shopping on it; the site was too difficult to navigate and required a ton of clicks; I couldn’t do my visual scans on a ton of say sleeping bags like on the old site. It became useless.
This is just retail but like well designed clothing, a well designed site is difficult to find. I find the mobile sites interesting because they FORCE a team to be practical. Maybe that’s the place to start before trying to predict behaviors that don’t exist.