A UX with no emergency exits can turn a good experience into a bad one
As a product designer, I’m always practicing the analytical side of the experiences I’m in contact with as a customer. I’m especially aware of the “don’t apply to” situations.
Also, I always empathize with those experiences because I know how hard it is to offer a quality and smooth experience from the beginning to the end, considering all the problems that can happen along the way.
I know how easy it is to good experiences to become bad ones.
When that happens, I like to study what went wrong and consider opportunities that could benefit that experience.
Here is the latest example of a bad experience that happened to me:
A month ago I just moved into Madrid. As a new person in town that knows poorly about Spanish services, I bought a random pre-paid phone chip for the month so that I had more time to understand other telephone companies. After that, I decided to do my portability to an online company.
Everything was going great because I could do my portability online with no worries through the whole process. Great!! So I paid for the new chip until the final action asked was to respond to a text message confirming the portability.
And now I’m stuck.
Since my pre-paid chip had already no charge, I could not respond to the operation that I had already paid.
>My first try to exist the problem:
Ok, there must be another way to confirm the operation. There was none.
>My second try to exit the problem:
Ok, I’ll find the support to help me. Found a “Having any problem, call us at number…”.
As a typical millennial that hates phone calls, I was already upset. Plus, not having a charge in my former chip was a problem for phone calls as well.
After two days of non-reply to the message, the process got canceled. Also, I still did not receive any feedback about returning the money I spent on the operation.
Professionally analyzing the experience is possible to notice some primary UX issues:
#1: Lack of emergency exits
The experience lacked one of Nielsen’s heuristics about offering emergency exits to the user. Frequently users make mistakes and end up doing something unexpected or unwanted inside the product flow.
If that happens, UX designers must offer a way for the user to return to the flow or continue another way.
In this specific situation, the service had only one way to happen, so when a user makes a mistake in the middle of the process, the only exit was to call for support (that didn’t help my problem).
#2: “Call this number for support”
Since the entire product experience is online-based, it is inconsistent for the support to be only by calling. Still, it comes to the lack of other emergency exits.
Also, it is normal for many services to offer email support, online support chats, bot chats, frequent questions, and stuff, to help their customers with their problems.
#3: Canceling status feedback
Any experience that involves money is sensible to users. Any situation of payment for a non-received service is very problematic to your UX.
In this case, the first thing that comes to my mind is why the payment comes earlier than the confirmation. Honestly, I can’t say if that choice is good or bad because maybe it was an operational situation.
The second aspect about the canceling operation that caught my attention is that there was no feedback about the operational tax paid previously. So now I do not have any idea what will happen to that money.
The lack of emergency exits and other heuristics in an experience can cause a considerable difference in how the user may percept your product. Heuristic evaluations are an effective way of not forgetting about important primary UX good manners such as heuristics.
Here are some good examples of emergency exits and feedbacks:
