In the last post Travis talked about managing user expectations by providing helpful information back to the user.  The idea is to keep the user informed so they feel in control, but too often I see status messages that are either confusing or just plain rude.  This causes the exact opposite effect: feeling out of control.  Here are just a few examples I’ve collected in the last week:

While syncing my Google calendar with my Outlook calendar, I received this message. I love that it warned me before taking a seemingly drastic action, but how do I know which 136 events it’s even talking about? I’m guessing it was referring to one or two reoccurring events that got moved or rescheduled, but the point is that I wasn’t sure and had NO way to find out. I clicked “yes” hoping it wasn’t 136 client meetings. (Fingers crossed…)

This geek-speak gave me a chuckle while I waited for my computer to begin its back-up. (My computer is either extremely slow at “reticulating” or has a crazy amount of “splines.”) Perhaps I shouldn’t complain – the back-up went fine – but this unhelpful message had a be-quiet-the-adults-are-talking tone that I found a bit pretentious. I don’t like when technology talks down to me.

This bizarre message from Outlook surprised me. No apology, no explanation, no suggestion…just a curt refusal to perform its intended function and one lone “OK” button for me to acknowledge its belligerence. Fine. But no, Outlook, it’s not ok.

At the end of the week, I thought I’d leave all these techno-hurdles behind and go fill up my gas tank. I pulled up to the pump, swiped my plastic, and waited for the electronic nod to begin my part of refined oil consumption. Instead, I was accused of some apparent “invalid loyalty.” Maybe that was just more geek-speak for a bad card swipe, I thought, so I swiped my card again. Invalid loyalty. What was going on here? Had I broken some solemn vow to Speedway? “It’s true,” I was prepared to tearfully confess, “I’ve been seeing other gas stations!” Turns out, though, that the pumps were simply set to align with the company’s current “loyalty card” marketing push. What a great example of marketing and engineering teaming up to complicate what should be a simple transaction.

As an aside, I was surprised that I couldn’t solve this pump problem on my own (I had to ask the attendant for help), but I was more surprised at how my expectations—my mental model—of how I thought a gas pump should work blinded me from considering other alternatives. But in my defense, I think it’s reasonable to expect things to work the same way they worked the previous 100 times.

It’s interesting to note that, other than Outlook refusing to send my email, the technology at hand worked exactly as designed: my Google calendar reconciled my events, my online back-up ran faithfully, and I drove away that day from the pump with a full tank of gas. Yet the user experiences were needlessly clunky. And as this blog demonstrates, that’s what we remember.

People are good at waiting for what they want, but only as long as they know how long they are going to have to wait.

This situation happens all the time. Think about the last time you were frustrated or had a bad experience at a restaurant. Was it the food? Probably not. It was probably the fact that you had to wait longer than anticipated for a table, or that you could not find your waiter to place your order or get the check. Think about other regularly frustrating events in your life, the DMV, the post office, Christmas shopping, or visiting your in-laws. It is not that these situations are terrible; it is just that they take longer than you initially thought they should.

So how does this relate to usability on the Internet or software?

As you design a product you need to manage the user’s expectations about:

1. What is possible
2. What is currently happening
3. How long it is going to take.

This can take the form of a progress indicator:

an accurate loading timer:

or simple information about where a link takes you.

We have all been exposed to poor implementations of this type of information. As we wait for a progress bar to fill in something happens…Is the bar still moving?? Did my computer freeze? How do I stop this thing? If the user has a question mark after their thought, you are losing them.
As technology users become more savvy, they are less patient and more apt to move to another technology.

As designers of technology, we need to understand how to avoid this type of frustration by identifying potential issues early in the design process and come up with creative ways to solve them.

Also, we can utilize user testing to find possible frustration points within a product, and test ways of solving these issues by providing the user with information - information to know where they are, know where they can go, and tell them how long it is going to take to get there.

Until next time, keep it usable Internets.