The Most Critical User Experience Problems
Posted on December 12th, 2008 in Usability | 4 Comments »
What are the most critical user experience problems we all face right now? I’ve been thinking about this for months and I’m kind of at a loss. Nevertheless, I’ll outline a few things I’ve found.
1. There is a pressing need to consolidate the user experience issues under the social media umbrella. What I mean is that there is a huge cluster of UX problems I see on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and so on. (Are you following me on Twitter?) The controls are not consistent. The interactions are not similar. The widgets are freakish and are far from standard.
2. Similar to the issues above, there are performance issues with social media and web 2.0 sites. They are often slow, broken, and down. The amount of downtime is shocking. Worse, many parts of sites are broken. I’m talking about issues related to “Frankenstein designs” where sites are built on half-baked CMS’s (old blog platforms), RSS feeds, and poorly built widgets. All of these things mean one thing: performance suffers and therefore users suffer.
3. No one has cracked the mobile user experience code. What I mean is that most web sites do not offer up a clean experience to users via mobile devices, most notably iPhones and new SmartPhones. Even with ever-more-powerful web browsers cooked into mobile devices (which are needed since sites are so poorly optimized for mobile viewing), users are being punished. This is almost certainly causing a slow, steady shift of user eyeballs to new sites that are more friendly. And, “more friendly” mostly means simple, clean, dumbed-down designs. There won’t be much sophistication for 1-2 more years, in my opinion.
4. Like the comment above, buying and selling goods and services via mutliple touchpoints is miserable unless done through well-established sites. The undeniable advantage currently goes to PayPal, eBay, Amazon, and other established players. There’s been a paucity of innovation in the personal financial transaction space. In other words, it’s still not easy enough to buy and sell on the internet via the web, phone, or other channel. Yes, users are accustomed to difficult transactions but that doesn’t make them good or effective. It’s a UX problem sitll, no doubt. Social sites and mobile devices are just making this harder and hard.
5. Users are being punished by the lack of control over their identities. This is a grievous and disturbing issue. We’re not being given enough control over our online identities. There’s a lack of visibility to our own data. There are several giant sucking vaccum web sites out there, pulling in user data at a dizzying rate. More and more personal data is captured and stored. And yes, exploited. Privacy and trust continue to be real issues. Reputation management tools are likewise missing. If someone says something nasty about you, what can you do about it? In fact, how do you even know you’ve been hammered? This problem is rarely discussed, but it’s real.
What other user experience problems are you seeing?
~ John
4 Responses
Good list and suggest that privacy is dead. We have not had privacy since someone entered our details into a database and it would probably scare us if we knew how much of us is scattered over the place … agree there should be better ways to protect, edit and own it.
I agree with you on a lot of points. But to cast a little light on a grim media landscape, I must admit I was pleasantly surprised by the mobile version of the New York Times. I just bought a second generation iPod Touch (which in itself is one of the most pleasing UX i’ve hever had, except for the horrible iTunes software on Windows) and reading news on the NYT mobile site is a great, albeit limited, experience. Compared to a lot of other mobile versions of mainstream media websites, they win hands down.
That’s a great list and I agree with it. I also agree on your privacy concerns.
The problem is that every website which requires user registration is potentially a personal data collector: every time we register to a website or we put our data on a online form we are giving away our personal data to strangers.
Personally I hope that emerging identity tools like OpenID will provide a solution to these privacy issues.
Paypal for me is a great example of tool which really improve customers privacy and that’s a good example to follow. We no more have to send our credit card numbers but just use Paypal to transfer the money. That’s a win-win scenario.
This list definitely hit 5 critical issues. I’ve definitely experienced all 5 in some fashion. Especially #2 talking about Mobile Web. I think, in general, site designers are having a hard time because people are using so many different ways to get online. This includes Mobile Web Devices, but different web browsers too, since the popularity of IE is quickly spiraling downwards. Formatting for Google Chrome, for example, is introducing design issues that weren’t there for IE or Firefox.
Some people I’ve talked to think that another thing that is quite aggravating is the number of 404 errors that come up when surfing the web. As webmasters scramble to edit outdated content or relaunch new websites, old content and sites get killed without proper notice or attempts to redirect these users to the new content. A few guys I know created this site, http://www.errorlytics.com to help webmasters ID their 404 errors and try to preserve some site visits that otherwise would’ve been lost. I totally think that it’s a great idea because it keeps both the site owner and the user happy.