Quote of the day: "This is where you stop looking at your startup as a self-masturbatory piece of UX genius and start looking at it as a business"
There was an article on HN the other day about expedia increasing revenue by removing a confusing form field on their booking process. I think the lesson is that users find different things confusing / annoying than UX experts (or web designers). UX experts ramble on about 'clutter' and simplification, however, in my experience, everyday people have a high tolerance to clutter as long as its the right clutter and that clutter is easy to understand (or is a really great deal). At the end of the day, put your faith in data driven split testing, not UX zealots.
I take issue with the expression "UX Experts" as you use it. In fact, I deliberately invoke the "No True Scotsman" argument: If someone is an actual expert in the field, they know that what they find confusing is different than what a user finds confusing, and that what they find aesthetically offensive is irrelevant to what works or doesn't work for the target audience/user.
What you are speaking of is the "UX Zealot," exactly as you say at the end of your argument.
Note that I am not claiming that "The set of all UX professionals who are also experts is non-empty," just that if someone is an expert, then certain things apply. So you may not need to apologise :-)
And anecdote about my first experience with the intricacies of design. A company I worked for about 10 years ago was building an application that had lots of graphic elements to it. One of the colours they were using was red. It was being used throughout the application in bold ways. It looked really nice and slick. However, when we went to show it off to the partners, they were taken aback. See, they were from Taiwan (or some other nation in that region, I forget which), and they were almost insulted by the colour red. Using red was frowned upon for reasons I can't remember, but I believe it had to do with poor luck. Basically, it was bad to use the red.
It was at that moment that I realised that UX is not as easy as making it simple to use. UX isn't build around rules, but reason built on testing.
Do you perhaps have this backwards? In the West, the common association green-good, red-bad is pretty common. In Asia it is usually reversed: green-bad, red-good.
Maybe. There was a lot of green in the application as well, so that could very well have been it. It was 10 years ago, and I wasn't involved in the design. Whatever the color, it looked good design wise, but we had to change the color because of the culture.
This doesn't address his core point. I've always believed that users will tolerate a surprising amount of crap to get what they want. Godaddy isn't exactly suffering.
To give some context, we certainly don't prescribe to the cluttered aesthetic of some other Japanese ecommerce sites. We are much more about letting the product do the talking:
True. And speaking of GoDaddy a client recently mentioned that they registered two new domains with godaddy. Total cost (with all the ridiculous, unneeded extras): $138
Misleading and intentionally confusing UX can be very good for business.
Every piece of "bloat" has two consequences: it annoys some users -- possibly to the point of scaring them away from the service -- and it convinces some other users to do something profitable.
The fact is, savvy users are much more likely to stick with a bloated system than we like to imagine. I still buy tickets from Orbitz, despite the pages of upsells I have to click through, because I have an account there and I know their quality of customer service.
There's good stuff here, but one worry... The stuff about fading customer acquisition and needing to upsell existing customers more... This sounds an awful lot like the trap that many "mature" companies get into where growth levels off and they switch their focus to squeezing the maximum amount of revenue out of existing customers.
There's a tradeoff, and all of the business practices involved in squeezing more out of the "captive audience"--pricing, UX, everything--drive some customers away and alienate other prospective customers.
This drives the need to squeeze even more out of captive customers, and the business and their most entrenched customers begin to circle each other in a deadly embrace.
The author isn't advocating any of this, of course, it's a post about UX. But I did get that feeling like the argument was part and parcel of this dilemma facing businesses as they mature.
I'm not really sure where this is coming from, but really any sensible UX person will say "good UX is requiring the least out of users to allow them to achieve their goals while having enough to deliver your business objectives" and not "less is better".
Obviously there is no perfect balance for any market and bloat is a completely subjective value to tag on to anything. Bloated in relation to what? In what context?
For a site that sold £1000 shoes Amazon's UX principles would be a crazy strategy to implement, but if you apply the same idea visa-versa I imagine that Amazon would be able to measure lost revenue in the tens of millions. But there will be an underlying essential UX requirement because both sites are based on the principle that people have actively chosen to look for an item, and by making that decision they are, more than likely, willing to put up with more than, say, someone looking around a support site for help with their printer drivers.
> This is where you stop looking at your startup as a self-masturbatory piece of UX genius and start looking at it as a business.
What crap. User experience and business aren't mutually exclusive. You have a choice: make money as a result of making your users happy or make money at the expense of their happiness. It's as simple as that. As your decisions compound on one side of that balance or the other, the shape of your brand begins to emerge.
My preference, continually, is to work with companies who optimize their business on the side of making me happy. They are playing a long term game that I respect, and which respects me. On the other side, that's the kind of user experience I want to create myself.
It's a bit like arguing that you can be a successful organism by being an asshole. Its definitely true that you can. But I posit you can be a successful organism by being good to people, and that the upshot is that it's a lot more fun.
Edit: And, of course, this is an exhausting trope, but do I need to mention that one of the largest companies in America makes great user experience the acid test for their business decisions?
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3.""
"User experience and business aren't mutually exclusive."
They are not necessarily always aligned either
and you may have to choose at one point. UX is very subjective and taking a dogmatic approach to it and how it affects your business isn't a very good idea.
Since when is having a poor user experience good for business.
I would also say that having a poor User Interface and poor User Experience is doubly bad for business.
I'm reminded of the recent article posted here to HN about Expedia removing a single field from their checkout form that resulted in $12MM to the bottom line.
Since when is having a poor user experience good for business.
Would you like fries with that?
Article continues on page C8.
The DX is a fine automobile, sir, but the LX offers a lot of extra safety features, which I'm sure mean a lot to you with such a charming wife. (Are you newlyweds, ma'am?) Traction control, ankle air bags, anti-impact rustproofing, everything a lucky man like you needs to safeguard his precious cargo. And the premium for these features is really not much compared to what you have to lose.
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The product is configured using a bespoke business process description language that describes your configuration in intuitive problem-domain terms. It's so simple and intuitive, a non-technical person can understand this fake example! The support contract specifies that our consultants will be available at reasonable rates to attempt to train your business analysts to be programmers, and then to attempt to train your IT staff to write code in what turns out to be an arcane '80s-era language with dozens of undocumented bugs and sharp edges, and then to do all the work themselves at great cost since nobody can actually be trained to configure the product in any reasonable amount of time.
Wouldn't Google's UX be better if there were no ads? In the short term, maybe. In the long term, it would kill the company, so there wouldn't be any UX at all.
no, you're confusing UI and UX... without ads, the user interface might be better (less ads, less clutter, etc) however, it could be argued that without the ads the user EXPERIENCE would not be as good... as very often ads are highly relevant to what the user is searching for on google and are therefore of value to the user.
No, adverts are almost always irrelevant for almost everybody. They are a necessary (and sometimes unnecessary) evil. Most of us don't look for something to buy all the time. When I read my mail or a blog or whatever, that huge burger and coke ad right in the middle of the screen is an irrelevant distraction.
When I have to watch that very same 30 second Hoodie Footie Pajamagram - the perfect way to snuggle up - segment before each and every 3m news video on CNBC it's a torture for my brain.
I wish more sites gave me a reasonable way to buy myself freedom from that "highly relevant" bloat.
[Edit] As a service provider, I appreciate the convenient excuse you provide for torturing my users ;-)
I think Google's billions in revenue and profits would beg to differ with you. (ads on google search results are generally highly relevant and get clicked a lot)
you are right, however, if the people you are generalizing for are HN folks, and websites other than Google.
Revenue and relevance is not quite the same. A 1% clickthrough rate would lead to great revenue for all concerned, but it still means I'm annoying 99% of my users (or one user 99% of the time).
Of course, not all non-clickers would be terribly annoyed, but many of the clickers might still be annoyed by the distraction even though the ad was relevant enough to click on.
"Since when is having a poor user experience good for business."
You'd do better to ask which situations it is good for business,and which situations focusing on a strong UX can distract from more pressing concerns, or worse.
The article mentions one potential situation of the later type and I strongly suspect that large e-commerce firms do know what they are doing for the most part. The Expedia example you cite clearly shows that they do, in fact, experiment with their UX. (It doesn't clearly show that there is a correlation with removing fields and clutter and increasing profits, we'd need a lot more datapoints than that.)
CWuestefeld, mentions another, where they have to cater to two very different kinds of customers with different needs and usage patterns. There is no single UX that would satisfy both and I suspect that it would be prohibitively expensive to target them separately, hence business, in this situations trumps UX.
Clearly this isn't always the case and everything being equal, good UX will probably trump bad UX, but everything rarely is equal, and that's the problem.
I can't say I agree with this. Maybe you're thinking of UI, which I would agree can be very subjective.
Great UX, on the other hand, in the most simple possible terms, is the application of the golden rule to any interactive system: software, gadget, subway system, what have you. "If I had to use this thing, how would I want it to work?"
As a result, it's a pretty simple thing to test: how does this implementation enhance or detract from the user's ability to do what they're trying to do?
The degree of impact may be subjective, but I think it's pretty easy to tell when something is user hostile or user friendly.
The only way that UX can be globally optimal is if all users share the same goals, the same skills and understanding, the same capabilities (browser caps, etc.).
In the real world, where people have at least slightly different goals, are more or less sophisticated, and sometimes use IE6, compromises -- sometimes deep ones -- must be made.
For example, on our ecommerce site, we've got at least two very different user personas. One is what you might think is typical -- an end-user who browses, trying to figure out what to buy. The other is a purchasing manager, simply working his way down a purchase order. In many parts of the process these two people have very different needs. Obviously we want to try to cater to both of them, but multiplying the options in itself has effect on the UX.
>how does this implementation enhance or detract from the user's ability to do what they're trying to do?
If you're capitalistic about things though sometimes you want to do what will hinder your user's ability to fulfill their goal.
For example at the supermarket - I want to get milk and get away quick but the supermarket wants me to go through the whole store and be confronted with offers and the smell of the instore bakery, etc.. My experience is frustrated on purpose to benefit the business financially.
Similarly with "checkout" offers on a sales website. One particular printer makes you manually leaf through about 12 pages of offers after you've confirmed your purchase - it's a poorer UX (IMO) but will benefit the business.
Others will argue, this last case say, is an improved UX as I get the chance to bag offers I perhaps hadn't noticed. Thus it's subjective.
Shiny is an aesthetic description. The importance of this discussion goes much deeper — simplicity versus complexity, and who benefits from each.
Upsells are an obstacle to completing your purchase. They're annoying. They are added compexity that has a nominal chance of benefiting the user. In contrast, they are guaranteed to benefit the company, since as a numbers game, you'll end up pitching enough upsells to convert n additional sales.
When considering the impact of adding complexity, imagine a toilet. Or, rather, your access to a toilet. Some toilets are a door knob away. Others require you to hunt down a coin and drop it into a slot before providing access.
Which toilet are you more proud to have in your business?
This is really quite an easy problem to solve. Run the upsell. If only a small percentage of users go for it, throw it away, since it's probably doing more harm than good.
I no longer use godaddy, partly because I got tired of wading through their ridiculous number of upsells. There's got to be a balance.
You're talking to a former salesman here — the art of the virtuous upsell is a delicate bit of work that takes time to practice. For humans. Very few ecommerce companies give a damn about doing the algorithmic legwork necessary to upsell "the right deal."
Even Amazon, the crem de la crem in ecommerce IT magic, doesn't often nail it for me. They get away with it, though, by being respectful to me. No interstitial horseshit, just a respectful suggestion that doesn't ever detract from my main activity — buying the things I am certain I want.
You can make money by surprising your users — Google made billions doing this with AdWords. It works for them by being good on a pretty solid basis and never being in the way when it isn't.
> When considering the impact of adding complexity, imagine a toilet.
A bidet and a toilet with toilet paper. I'd find a bidet confusing and awkward.
Upsells are useful. You make the assumption they only serve the company. This is wrong. Take for example the last upsale I purchased. I bought a Kindle. Amazon upsold a case for the Kindle before the checkout.
Apple pushes upsales all the time as well. I challenge anyone to go by a Mac in an Apple store, and try to buy it without having to mention to have the sales person discuss MobileMe, AppleCare, or OneOnOne.
You make the assumption that upsales are annoying and are obstacles. That's not true. The design of upsales can be made an obstacle or annoying, but then, I could argue the same about anything. Heck, I could take a blank page and turn it into an obstacle.
Seriously, can anyone tell me what is the correct way to use a bidet? Do you sit facing the wall, so you can control the temperature and volume of water? Or do your try to adjust all that first, and then sit facing out as with a toilet?
The traditional bidet has a variety of severe UX problems as evidenced by the universal confusion over a number of issues on first use.
The old style european type is designed such that you should be facing the controls. Which is only reasonable when you think about but requires a non-intuitive posture.
There are now electronic ones which integrate with a toilet and provide a control pad.
Don't indulge yourself with a bidet as they can be habit forming.
I agree on Amazon, they do their upsells in a great way that isn't distracting. They don't say "Hey, fuck you, user, can't complete the transaction until you consider this offer!"
By and large, though, don't split hairs with me, how many people are doing upsells right?
edit: Bidet complexity is significant, but the benefit is that your asshole is clean and fresh without needing a shower. Which is extraordinary, but obviously only for power users. But that's a different UX kettle of fish.
I don't use GoDaddy. I wouldn't know. Why bring them up? As evidence that upsales can be done poorly? I never contested that. You did say that upsales are annoying complexity, obstacles to a purchase.
> By and large, though, don't split hairs with me, how many people are doing upsells right?
Most every place I frequent does upsales well, whether offline or online. I find good upsales a reason to frequent.
People doing upsales right? Apple. Amazon. Ebay (considering your not just buying something, but customising a service). DomainSite, the company I purchase my domains from, does the upsales easily without impeding the checkout process. Choose domain => shopping cart => checkout => Payment info. Along the way, options are provided, but nothing that gets in the way. Also, just now checking, those steps all fall in the same visual area on the page, so you're eyes are already where it needs to be for the next step. Not sure if that's intentional or not.
Regardless, upsales aren't bad. Bad design is still bad, however, one has nothing to do with the other.
Isn't Google a huge, obvious exception to his thesis?
To be fair, it's not an e-commerce site, but it preserves user experience at the expense of "leaving zillions of dollars on the table" in "lost revenue" by not plastering the site with ads. I think in light of Google a big part of his argument is preposterous.
That is only true if more obtrusive ads were necessarily the more revenue-maximizing. Even the article admits that the obtrusiveness from up-selling can be counter-productive and be revenue-harmful.
I believe that when Google changed the ad click area to just the title/link rather than the whole div, the total # of clicks was lowered (fewer misclicks), but revenue was not affected since the value of each click was higher.
You can certainly have a successful business without a proper UI/UX. Don't think for a second, though, that a good UX won't significantly improve your company. Facebook itself started as being the clean, user-friendly alternative to competitors like Friendster and Myspace.
I don't think upselling has to be a negative thing ... if you put a bit of thought into it and are actually trying to help the user, it definitely could be a big plus.
I love when I put a book or some Music in my cart at Amazon and it shows me related items I could be interested in ... I think almost 25-50% of the stuff I've bought from there has been as a result of this.
What I do find rather retch-inducing is this idea that you as a business are 'leaving money on the table' by not trying to upsell me, it shows that you see me as a wallet and could care less whether I find some awesome book or new music that makes my week.
I would never want any business I run/start to end up like that.
It's possible to both up sell and have a good UX. Provided the upsell UI is sensibly restricted, unobtrusive and actually related.
Sometimes up selling can actually helpful. I brought a camera recently because I dropped my last one and smashed the screen. After adding it the basket the site listed a few related accessories which included a leather case. Following my recent breakage it's exactly what I needed, but for some reason I had totally forgotten. As it happens I searched a bit a got a different case, but it was their upsell prompt that reminded me I needed one.
Thank god someone finally says something about this. If I see another one of those "73 Beautiful Web Designs" with all the same layout and content type (simple blog) I'm going to go nuts.
What's with the disagreements? His argument is against the claim that "'simple' is unilaterally better for your business." He's entirely correct. At some point, you'll have to go out and get new customers if you want continued growth. Public companies - the commerce variety he mentions specially - are implicitly required by shareholders to show such growth if they are to remain relevant. And so, you'll have to find ways to make that happen. Upselling seems to be one such source.
The trick to being nice is that you have to do it even when it seems like a bad idea. This isn't because suffering losses is virtuous, it's because you lack the ability to tell when it's safe to be mean. If you have an extraordinary ability to predict user backlash, which you may well have, by all means go ahead and piss some people off. But don't scold people for having the humility to know that they personally can't get away with it.
There is no right answer to this. As hinted in the article, you can have a good business with a cluttered UX (hello Ebay) and you can have a good UX with a bad business model (hello thousands of web2.0 companies). Or, you can have the best of both worlds: good UX + good business (hello Apple).
I don't see UX and Business as mutually exclusive.
Great post, simple explanation: UX people don't measure profit. That's a huge disconnect that leads to these weird professional silos between UX and marketing/ecommerce. The sooner UX people start measuring profit -- like they should -- the better.
There was an article on HN the other day about expedia increasing revenue by removing a confusing form field on their booking process. I think the lesson is that users find different things confusing / annoying than UX experts (or web designers). UX experts ramble on about 'clutter' and simplification, however, in my experience, everyday people have a high tolerance to clutter as long as its the right clutter and that clutter is easy to understand (or is a really great deal). At the end of the day, put your faith in data driven split testing, not UX zealots.