UX Crash Course: User Psychology
thehipperelement.com
thehipperelement.com
> If your marketing department wants to know anything about why the user is cancelling, put it in the form. Two pages of boring questions is a great way to reduce conversion.
> Break the form into many pages so it takes longer. Include links to FAQ pages. And avoid using defaults; it maximizes the number of conscious choices for the user.
> Ask them to explain their reasons for cancelling, and require at least 100 letters of text. Explaining is hard when your reasons are emotional.
Really? Obviously I don't want to make it too easy for users to cancel, but to make it too hard just seems petty to me. Asking them to fill out the reasons for cancellation is a great idea (and worked really well for us), but forcing them to write at least 100 letters is just horrible.
Also, there are some users that you really do want to cancel. You know, the ones that suck up twice as much support as anyone else and complain incessantly.
Surely its more important to be focusing on why users are cancelling, not luring them through a maze of "two pages of boring questions"? Does anyone reputable actually do this?
There is a sweet spot somewhere in between, but this seems to be irritating and would just make me want to write complete junk responses.
I agree. After a few minutes of after-thought I have updated the article to reflect this feedback.
Thanks, everyone. I appreciate the input.
As a user, I hate you for that.
Here's some UX for you - the user owes you nothing.
Sure have an optional form or field for cancellations but 5 minutes? How is this beneficial for anyone?
So, it's a free product - they will just never cancel their account and you will have inactive users sitting there. Who is this good for?
So it's a paid product - they will cancel their account and tell everyone about the ridiculously long winded process they had to go through to cancel it.
We can argue over whether or not the original suggestion constitutes fraud, but the credit card companies will definitely treat it as fraud.
Not the main reason, but because it's easy to cancel it, I don't worry about signing back (counter-example: gym subscription).
A UX post, on how a site should prevent users from cancelling to benefit the website, at the expense of the user.
That is the opposite of a good UX.
Here is some 'User pseudo-psychology' for you... Having your blog titles take up more than half the vertical space of my browser (when it is full screen) stops me reading your writing.
XD
In all seriousness, would love to see a guide from the more scientifcally-researched vein of this type of work.
Anyone who thinks they are a UX Designer who wants to make the cancellation process as hard as possible obviously has a very shitty product if the only way to retain your users is to try and make them fill out forms with minimum values. Really, 100 characters? "aksfwejfjwefjwewefj" will be all you get, you evil shit.
[0] https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/448918439793815552
Made hiring a frontend person much much easier.
Then your vision of the design world is quite simplistic. Having studied both CompSci and Design Engineering at college, I can tell you that design can be very complex, and the term “Designer” is as abstract as “Computer Scientist”, where you have distributed systems researchers, back-end devs, Ops, database administrators, release engineers, QA Engineers, and thousands of specialities.
The design field is HUGE (go and visit IDEO), ranging from mere Graphic Designers (what you've reflected as "PSD Designer"), to UX/UI Designers (those building human-computer interfaces ), to Design Engineers and Industrial Designers that have a solid base of engineering (physics, maths, materials, CAD/CAE, ergonomy, etc) and are able to shape tangible as well as non-tangible products.
Leading Designers [0] usually belong to the latest group... Pininfarina (Ferrari's Designer), Philippe Stark (who worked closely with Steve Jobs crafting his Yatch but also does graphic design and a lot of other design specialities [1]), Jony Ive (leading the iDevices industrial design but also the UI), Dieter Rams, etc.
[0] http://images.businessweek.com/ss/10/02/0201_worlds_most_inf...
I actually find that about 50% of people who cancel end up coming back. I also have NEVER had a user contact me about how to cancel their account. They just do it. No problem, no interaction, no bullshit 'let me talk to you first' run around.
If you are trying to keep people from cancelling by making it difficult to do so, YOU ARE BAD AT BUSINESS.
The solution is simple, you need to clearly cite and link to your sources.
As well as making the source authors happy, this will be very helpful for readers who want to do further research.
I want more information on screen, more settings, more logic.
The UI trend however seems to be less information on screen, less settings, and more "The UI knows better what you want than you do" :(
The overall problem is that what UI designers think 'a more suitable UI' is, probably won't be for many users. Think of it like the open-office plan. It's horrible for employees, most people absolutely hate it, it lowers productivity, and yet corporations have people on staff who are implementing it as fast as they possibly can because it's more "suitable".
Consider this: Microsoft Windows (prior to Windows 8) was by all accounts a clunky, poorly conceived UI...that allowed users to modify it to look just about any way they wanted.
Now we have applications like Twitter and Facebook constantly re-arranging their users layout, and the most recent changes have been to increase font size, reduce the information on the screen, all of the things that many users (such as myself) do not want.
I find this perplexing...how did we as a UI culture going from having bad design that I could control to having bad design that I can't control?
This guide reads more like those old guides for how to use SEO to drive traffic to your dung-heap. I don't know how others feel but I want to create a good experience for my users, not convince the masses that they are my users so I can go to some freemium lowest-common-denominator model.
Is web dev the wrong place for me or are we just in a bubble phase for these people who try to use their "clever interfaces" to regress humans to some animal state? (If you look at the chapter headers in this guide I don't think I'm out of line... its literally about addiction, sex, etc.)
Alls you need to do is go back in time a bit, say 150 years, to see some parallels with the way that newfangled electricity thing was seen as the solution for all life's problems. Doctors waving Geissler tubes over their patients to cure, electrical beds to improve women's sex drive, electrical hairbrushes because, well, it's electrical and thus cures rheumatism and constipation, electrical baths - both dry and wet - to improve health and stamina, electric underwear to 'cure any ailment'.
And now? Electricity has certainly revolutionised society, but not by using it to cure constipation or zap innocent bathtubs. The web also revolutionised society, and the mobile 'net is poised to extend that revolution even further - but not by creating dating apps or yet another calendar-planner-todo-list-organiser.
All of the cognitive biases are described on Wikipedia. The links are in the articles.
I used to think UX meant a wider "systems" approach to the man-machine interface, incorporating findings from CHI, cognitive science, user studies, etc.
Now it seems like it is becoming a name for the design of marketing your product in the experience economy, not helping perform a task more efficiently (unless the "task" is selling to the user).
I'd like to see some discriminating term separating this from the UI-to-the-machine (UIttM ?) where streamlined presentation of the right info just-in-time is important, versus the "create more clicks for A/B testing" sales growth-hacking / I can make a web page with fonts.
I dunno, maybe this is a false dichotomy and reflects some kind of design thinking that UX is a term to apply to everything. Did a UX person design the pattern on my toilet paper?
https://developer.android.com/design/get-started/principles....
Back when I was at university (not so long ago), usability was like you described - it helping the user get their task done efficiently. Not the more modern version of "delighting the user in surprising ways".