Over the past few years, I have been involved in quite a few user research studies where product teams aimed to understand user barriers that prevented them from onboarding onto their platform, product, or technology. Based on findings from all such studies, I could synthesize a framework that would assist product teams to build hypotheses about user reactions to onboarding before they set out to conduct their studies.
Model introduction
Regardless of market segments, it was widely observed that, when trying to explore something new, users exhibit apprehensive behavior rooted from two primary product deficiencies. Lack of relevant, contextual, and aligned information, and complex interfaces.These two metrics influence comprehension and confidence in the user.
Comprehension refers to the user's understanding of the ecosystem and what is required of them. For example, While evaluating the ease of installation of a Bluetooth device, do users understand what Bluetooth technology means? Do they know its operation is dependent on proximity? Do they know that their Bluetooth device requires a power source? etc
If a user exhibits high comprehension of the technology, chances are that he would require only nudges for taking action. Users with low comprehension require better learnability. In those cases, the design teams need to (design for learnability) understand how can they best convey relevant and contextual information about the technology to the users throughout their journeys.
The other metric is Confidence. This refers to the user's confidence to troubleshoot, navigate and reverse errors when needed. A user with low confidence might require handholding through their journeys, a good idea then would be to identify critical breaking points in the journeys that create this lack of confidence. Improving comprehension at those breaking points would significantly improve confidence.
This one time, my research team and I were trying to evaluate why the Next billion users in India were not using UPI payments even after the pandemic. The aim was to understand what could be done to address user apprehensions about using digital payments. Users tested a UPI payments app and discussed their anxieties, impressions, perceptions about digital payments, and their past experiences with such apps.
Throughout the course of interviews we often found users say things like:
"UPI PIN? Yes, I know what that is…it is sort of like a CRM PIN that we get at the bank."
"I don't know how exactly but I know that hackers can easily hack into your bank account and exort money…I have disabled online transaction in my bank account because of this."
These user stories highlight the miscomprehension and apprehension that surrounds the topic. To be able to make sense of these we needed to separate comprehension and confidence to create abstract extreme behavior. Designing for these extremes would take care of users that fall in the middle.
Understanding each quadrant
Once product teams are sure that their value proposition is aligned with their target users, they can use these 4 behaviors to understand needs.
Assurance Seeker: This archetype exhibits high comprehension but low confidence, because of which at each level this user seeks system feedback. This user needs to know if things don't go as planned, what is the contingency plan and what are its implications. Providing easy access to clear contextual system feedback would aid confidence over time for these users.
Outreach Seeker: This archetype exhibits High confidence and comprehension, if basic usability issues on the product are resolved, it is only a matter of product discovery for these users to jump aboard.
Error management Seeker: This archetype is a unique case (and my personal favorite). They exhibit high confidence and low comprehension. The reason this is a unique case is that this clearly highlights that comprehension and confidence aren't dependent on each other. These users are convinced they know what they are doing and often find themselves in a tussle. It is absolutely critical that the product ensures that their confidence doesn't take a hit while making errors. This means that they need error prevention, error retrieval, and consistent confirmation before critical tasks. Nudges from the product like 'Are you sure you want to book your flight from Delhi to Mumbai on 24th of April for 3658/-?' and having mechanisms within these nudges to edit their selections can go a long way to improve their user experience.
Assistance Seeker: This archetype exhibits low comprehension and confidence. Providing contextual help throughout critical task flows and journeys and explaining what affordances are present on the screen assists these users. A great example of Assistive UI can be found here
What to keep in mind while designing for each quadrant?
What ingredients does one require when designing to assure users? Using the matrix can come in handy for this. We know that users that seek assurance are low on confidence, this lack of confidence can be caused by multiple reasons, like misinformation, social trends, lack of resources to cross-check whether their comprehension is proper or not, etc. I was part of a usability study for a UPI payments app. While trying to link their bank account to the app, a user articulated how despite viewing a process completion message on the screen, they were unsure if the bank account was linked. "This (process completion) message tells me that my task (on the app) is done, I don't know if my account is still linked or not…I have not received anything from my bank's end" This needs for cross-checking and verifying is sourced from a general mistrust in the process and systems in place. User experiences designed for maximum transparency loaded with intuitive system feedback would be ideal for such users.
Similarly, we know that users that seek better outreach need marketing strategies that are more aligned to where their attentions are stationed. If they tend to spend the most time watching TV, their chances of discovering the product value on TV are higher. These users require not just alignment of marketing initiatives but also messaging. What message should be conveyed at what product engagement stage needs to be understood. While evaluating the learning behaviour of developers we identified that there were a lot of e-learning platforms to choose from. There was enough content for developers to know about best practices to follow. Hence, it was critical to play up that this brand of e-learning platform provided reliable content. When there is a content overload on a topic, evaluating usefulness and reliability becomes the biggest challenge. Conveying reliability as the value proposition as the first touchpoint has a higher chance of retaining the learners' attention.
Now, when designing for high-confidence and low-comprehension users, an assumption is that they would constantly complete unintended tasks, or make errors due to misinformation. How do you gently bring these users back to a state from where they can move ahead in the intended direction? Recently, I used Bitly, a URL-shortening service. I followed the usual process- registered my user name and created an account. However, when I tried to log in, I was unable to and the only message I received was “Nope. Try again.” But such an error message does not tell me where exactly I am going wrong. I am perplexed as to what I entered wrong: Was it the username or password or both? To top it all, the “Nope” also sounds a bit condescending to me- as if Bitly were mocking me for my mistake. Facebook on the other hand uses a good error-prevention strategy and clearly demarcates the errors- i.e., tells if a user name or a password is entered wrong. Facebook does wonderfully, even going one step further by telling you that you have entered an old password if you happen to make such a mistake.
Last in this group are users that exhibit low confidence and comprehension, of the lot, these require the most attention. Improving comprehension for these users such that the contextual learning provided on the screens, at every touch point, without making the user experience obtrusive and too simplified for advanced users can be tricky. While designing for better comprehension, knowing what pieces of information are critical for the user to know to be able to compelete tasks should be listed and designed in an intuitive manner. Let's say a File management app wants to help users with storage issues get rid of their old, overlooked, and unwanted files. The app would need to clearly visually demarcate (a) where and how can they find these kinds of files on the app and how to get rid of them and then (b) what can they do when managing their files. i.e take backups, edit, delete, search, move, copy, share, etc This is done well when you look at
Where the three largest affordances of the app are laid down clearly for the users to see.